Composers and their stage works 



Listening

Edward Albee

A chamber play. Originally conceived for radio - broadcast 1976


Constructed with the precision of a musical composition, and described by Clive Barnes as "a chamber opera and a symbolic poem about communication," the play juxtaposes three characters-"The Man", "The Woman" and "The Girl" - and sifts through the tangled relationship which they have evidently shared. The Man is amiable but distant; The Woman acerbic and bitter; The Girl is perhaps mad - a catatonic who has destroyed her own child. Elliptical in form and redolent with evocative overtones, the play weaves together its strands of conversation and soliloquy into a meaningful pattern of events underscoring the inescapable fact that while we may listen we do not always hear, and our lives, for better or worse, are shaped accordingly.