ABSTRACT

Patrick Magee was Samuel Beckett’s close collaborator and friend who, through his monologues on BBC radio in the early 1960s, shaped the parameters of a generic Beckettian character. It has been estimated that these classic early broadcasts, taking place over a relatively short period, reached audiences far in excess of any of the other avenues available to Beckett at the time. Yet it has not been sufficiently understood that Magee’s performances emerge from a wide and shifting field of biographical, aesthetic, professional and economic forces. Magee’s distinctive realization of Beckett’s voices took place in a context of his sustained experiment with the nature and function of character across several media, and in what follows I want to think through the nature and consequences of this mobility. To do so I will focus on his career from 1958 to 1964, that is to say, from the small part he played in the first airing of Beckett’s play All that Fall on the BBC Third Programme, to the Royal Shakespeare Company summer season at the Aldwych in London, which featured Magee as the leading man in all four plays staged, including Beckett’s Endgame and Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade.

摘要

帕特里克·马吉是塞缪尔·贝克特的亲密合作者和朋友，他在 1960 年代初期通过他在 BBC 电台的独白，塑造了一般贝克特式角色的参数。据估计，这些经典的早期广播在相对较短的时间内进行，其受众远远超过贝克特当时可用的任何其他途径。然而，人们尚未充分理解马吉的表演来自传记、美学、专业和经济力量的广泛而不断变化的领域。Magee 对贝克特声音的独特认识发生在他对多种媒体的性格性质和功能的持续实验的背景下，在接下来的内容中，我想思考这种流动性的性质和后果。