Review: CASCANDO, Jermyn Street Theatre

If you happen to be strolling around Piccadilly in the next couple of weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled upon an arcane cult ritual – or perhaps an unusually urban episode of The Traitors.

What you’re actually witnessing is the work of Irish company Pan Pan, who have reinvented Samuel Beckett’s underperformed 1961 radio play Cascando as a promenade piece. Audience members clad in black hooded cloaks are led, in uniform single file, by a company member around the vicinity of Jermyn Street as they listen to a pre-recording of the drama via headphones.

Once you get over the thought of bemused tourists looking on, and of crossing roads without being able to see beyond your hood, it’s a strangely meditative experience. The sense of individual isolation within a text while the rest of the world rumbles around you chimes well with Beckett’s prose, especially the ruggedly naturalistic imagery surrounding Woburn, the ‘character who never appears’ in this play about a novel the writer will never finish. Our footsteps themselves also add a rhythm to the relentless fight against writer’s block portrayed in the text.

But it’s not just an experience for the audience to passively enjoy – in Cascando, we’re actively performing in the drama. Before we leave for our becloaked stroll around the West End, we’re instructed by the company on how to perform – heads down, keeping pace with the audience member in front of you – and told that they intend for us to be “anonymous, but observed”.

It’s a curious choice for a play like Cascando, which is so intimately concerned with an individual creative struggle to find an ending to one’s writing, that we’ve essentially been drafted in to play faceless and soulless automatons – the promenade approach is perhaps better suited to plays concerned with community, or interactions with others.

The script we’re listening to is about the internal turmoil involved in making art, yet we listen to it in a state of inevitable self-consciousness at being perceived by the external world. Attending Cascando, then, feels like a tricky balancing act between listening to one work of art and simultaneously having a starring role in an entirely separate one.

This is a shame, since the recording itself is a fine introduction to Beckett’s play, amid something of a dark age for audio drama. Voice performers Daniel Reardon and Andrew Bennett are adept at the kind of pregnant pauses that allow the sparseness of Beckett’s writing to shine, and the abrupt jump cuts necessary to make this script work are handled well by sound designer Jimmy Eadie. ‘Music’ is a named character in Cascando, and the original compositions here (also by Eadie) are certainly characters in themselves, cinematically conjuring up all the doubt and moments of near-divine revelation in the text.

Pan Pan have come up with a strikingly interesting concept, and have a profound understanding of Beckett’s writing. This makes it all the more unfortunate that what ought to have been two different (and equally interesting) productions has coalesced into one. Still, I look forward to seeing what other plays I’ll be able to hear Pan Pan interpretations of through my headphones.

Cascando plays at Jermyn Street Theatre and its surroundings until 13 September