Play: Cascando

Overview
Samuel Beckett’s 1963 radio play Cascando compresses drama into sound, dividing the stage among three presences: a controller called Opener, a speaking Voice that spins a story about a man named Woburn, and Music that converses without words. The action is an attempt to reach an ending. Opener toggles Voice and Music on and off, searching for the moment when the story will finally close and silence can be earned. What results is a tension between narrative and its refusal to conclude, a ceremony of starting and stopping in which language and sound alternately surge and fail.

Structure and Roles
Opener speaks directly, jittery and driven by a compulsion to try again. He believes the right pattern of openings will let the story finish. He is both stage manager and anxious authorial figure, setting the conditions under which Voice and Music may proceed. Voice carries the fragmentary tale of Woburn, a man perpetually on the verge of crossing a threshold. Music functions as an equal partner, not mere accompaniment. It affirms, contradicts, or sidesteps Voice’s assertions, shaping the emotional weather of the piece. The three elements advance in discrete blocks, Opener’s commands, Voice’s narration, Music’s responses, interrupted by silences that feel like held breath.

The Woburn Story
Voice tells of Woburn’s repeated attempts to leave shelter and reach the sea. The weather is harsh, the path uncertain. He moves along shingle and dunes, edging past watchers, between cottages and coast, halting, resuming, corrected by memory and doubt. He imagines a place where he can lie down among the stones and end, but every approach is deflected by fear, fatigue, or the world’s resistance. Details appear and are revised, as if the telling itself cannot settle: was it this way, or that? Woburn slips back to the house, then sets out again, always nearing the shore where an ultimate quiet might be possible. The narrative is spare yet vivid, wind, rain, the rasp of pebbles, a door that may or may not open, shaped less as plot than as a pulse of advance and recoil.

Sound as Drama
Cascando’s dramaturgy is auditory. The play’s title, evoking a falling cadence, announces its design: a series of descents that never quite reach the bottom. Opener’s clipped imperatives, Voice’s uneven flow, and Music’s motifs create a counterpoint of will, language, and feeling. Sometimes Music seems to understand what Voice cannot say, tender where Voice is raw, urgent where Voice hesitates. Sometimes it refuses consolation and thins to near-silence. The balance of the three shifts across the piece, with Opener pushing for closure while Music and Voice collaborate or resist. The ear becomes the stage where conflict and recognition occur.

Themes and Effects
The play circles the desire to finish and the inability to do so. Opener’s refrain presses for an end, finish, no more, yet his very intervention keeps the cycle alive. Voice embodies the compulsion to tell, forever revising, trying to find the right words that would let the story complete itself and release the teller. Woburn’s journey outward to the sea mirrors an inward passage toward extinction, peace, or speechlessness; it also mirrors the artist’s labor to reach the final, adequate form. Music stands for what exceeds words: feeling, memory, the body’s knowledge, the pull of silence.

Ending
Cascando does not deliver a definitive closure. It brings its elements to a poised brink where the story might end, the sea might be reached, the music might finally fall away. The play’s power lies in that suspended cadence, the sense of ending approached from many angles but never grasped. In its last moments the figures draw near to quiet, and the listener is left in the echo of attempts: a drama of finishing that persists as long as there is breath to open Voice and Music once more.