Embers

Embers is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1957. First broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959, the play won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year. Donald McWhinnie directed Jack MacGowran – for whom the play was specially written – as “Henry”, Kathleen Michael as “Ada” and Patrick Magee as “Riding Master” and “Music Master”. Robert Pinget translated the work as Cendres and “The first stage production was by the French Graduate Circle of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Festival, 1977.”

The most recent version of Embers was broadcast in 2006 on BBC Radio 3 and directed by Stephen Rea. The cast included Michael Gambon as Henry, Sinéad Cusack as Ada, Rupert Graves, Alvaro Lucchesi and Carly Baker. This production was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 16 May 2010 as part of a double bill with a 2006 production of Krapp's Last Tape.

Opinions vary as to whether the work succeeds. Hugh Kenner calls it “Beckett’s most difficult work” and yet maintains that the piece “coheres to perfection,” John Pilling disagrees, remarking that Embers “is the first of Beckett’s dramatic works that seems to lack a real centre,” whereas Richard N. Coe considers the play “not only minor, but one of very few failures.” Anthony Cronin records in his biography of Beckett that “Embers met with a mixed reception the general tone of English criticism was somewhat hostile to Beckett” at the time.

The author’s own view was that it was a “rather ragged” text. He said that it was “not very satisfactory, but I think just worth doing … I think it just gets by for radio.”

For all his personal reservations the play won the RAI prize in the 1959 Prix Italia contest, not, as has been often reported, “the actual Prix Italia … which went to John Reeve’s play, Beach of Strangers.”