All That Fall is a speci¤cally radio play, or rather radio text, for
voices, not bodies. I have already refused to have it “staged” and I can-
not think of it in such terms. A perfectly straight reading before an
audience seems to me just barely legitimate, though even on this score
I have my doubts. But I am absolutely opposed to any form of adapta-
tion with a view to its conversion into “theatre.” It is no more theatre
than End-Game is radio and to “act” it is to kill it. Even the reduced
visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of
readings... will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and
which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.^9“To ‘act’ it is to kill it”: “radio text,” Beckett here reminds us, is par excel-
lence an art that depends on sound alone and hence cannot be converted to
the stage. Furthermore, the sound in question is not just that of the human
voice but also includes a complex network of nonverbal elements, musical or
otherwise. It makes little sense, then, to complain, as does John Pilling, that
Beckett should have included the voice of Henry’s father, along with Ada’s
and Addie’s voices, in the play:
The puzzling thing is that Henry’s control over voices does not extend
to the most crucial ¤gure of all, his father.... The failure to incorpo-
rate into the physical existence of the play its most important ¤gure is
not so much a failure of conception—though it might have served to
link Henry’s life to his story of Bolton—as of tact. There seems to be
no good reason for the omission.^10But there is a very good reason for the omission, which is that, unlike the
theater, radio makes it possible to represent characters by means of meto-
nymic sound images: The ghost of Henry’s father is indeed “heard” through-
out the play—not only when his son acts the role of medium, imitating such
parental exhortations as “Are you coming for a dip?” but also in the recurrent
“Please! please!” that Bolton addresses to Holloway, and, most important,
in the voice of the sea itself.^11 Indeed, Henry’s is not quite an interior mono-
logue like Malone’s or the Unnamable’s, for it moves easily in and out of the
narrator’s speci¤c consciousness and depends heavily on the elaborate pat-
terning of phrasal, verbal, and phonemic repetition.
Henry’s ¤rst halting words in Embers are “On,” “Stop,” and “Down,” each
one spoken twice, the second time more emphatically, as the exclamation
points indicate.^12 The predominant vowel sound is a long open “o” competing
with the sound of the sea: “[Sea, still faint, audible throughout what follows
106 Chapter 6