Its first radio broadcast was by the BBC Third Programme on 23 August 1960, directed by Barbara Bray with Jack MacGowran as Cream and Patrick Magee as Gorman.
In 1960 Pinget's play Lettre Morte was presented on a double bill with Krapp's Last Tape at the Théâtre Récamier in Paris.
the Reaveys attend a performance of the French production on which he had been working – and “used to cite this play as an illustration of how important the proper use of music could be to a playwright, especially one who was cognizant of the importance of unifying the two disciples.”[5] “By transforming the French into Irish rhythmic prose, Beckett went beyond translation to make the play his own, although it is less elusive than the drama which constitutes his fully original work.
It is easy to see what attracted him to the text, two men on the margins of society, facing isolation and semantic memory loss, which disrupts communication.”[6] The play opens to the sound of street noises.
They can't agree over the make of the first car they actually did see: Gorman thinks it was a “Pic-Pic” but Cream insists it was a “Dee Dyan Button”.
They move onto the condition of modern gardens especially the prevalent trend for erecting gazebos, the build quality of which they both find to be questionable.
Cream says he must be mistaken, it was Caterham and the pub was Harrison's Oak Lounge; he is doubly sure of this because he used to take his wife there on holiday.
They are both more alone than they want to admit, struggling to remember, fighting to find common ground and yet even when they seem to it turns into a new battlefield for these two but they keep soldiering on.
Gorman becomes nostalgic for the War: “[A]h those are happy memories.”[7] Clearly Cream's remembrances are not as ‘rose tinted’ though but he won't even give in on this generality.
The roar of an engine distracts them and the next thing he knows Gorman has changed the subject: he is asking after Cream's son, who is a judge.
From all accounts Gorman is thinking about his own mother, even though he is doesn't actually suffer himself either; his assertions are mere opinion presented as fact.
Gorman obviously is not well informed on legal issues and admits it; his only experience of judicial matters has been to witnesses his niece's divorce proceedings some thirty years earlier.
Gorman has always believed that Cream's daughter, whom he mistakenly calls his daughter-in-law, had “private means”[9] but it seems not; despite advise to invest in land, all the money had been put into the bank and lost during the War.
This causes the men to reminisce over people they used to know in the past: Helen Bliss, the butcher's daughter; Rosie Plumpton, now deceased; Molly Berry; Eva Hart, whose brother married Gertie Crumplin who, in her day, had been a “great one for the lads”;[12] Nelly Crowther, the daughter of Simon and Mary, who died in an explosion in a car along which injured a soldier, John Fitzball; John's aunt, “the high and mighty”[13] Miss Hester, and her niece, Miss Victoria, who was due to marry an American and who had a brother – the aforementioned John – who died of injuries sustained from the explosion a year or two later.
Beckett draws heavily on the stylized language of John Millington Synge, who had a similar upbringing to his, and the verbal excesses of Seán O'Casey, whose background could hardly have been different, to transform Pinget's original work into a pastiche, if not a parody of the whole Irish comic tradition of linguistic stereotyping; the Irishman as caricature.
In 1934, Beckett, in a review of O’Casey's Windfalls, which includes two one-act plays, writes: Gorman and Cream's worlds are crumbling around them just as their pasts and memories are doing.
Gorman's line, “You had to work for your living in those days, it wasn't at six you knocked off, nor at seven neither, eight it was, eight o’clock, yes by God,”[15] could be slipped almost unnoticed into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch – made famous by Monty Python – or just as easily Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys.
[16] The play was adapted to the stage shortly after publication in Evergreen Review 5.17, (March–April 1961) and first presented off-Broadway at the Royal Playhouse, New York City on 23 March 1961, directed by Steve Chernak with Sly Travers (Gorman) and Jack Delmonte (Cream).