His most famous composition consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (4'33"). He wrote a book called Silence. The US composer John Cage was fascinated by the absence of sound, yet when he came to write a radio play in 1982 he went to the other extreme, creating a Babel. James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet consists of 15 voices interwoven into a collage of words about a collection of famous figures from the past, including Thoreau and Mao Tse Tung, as well as the three 20th-century innovators named in the title.
The play is an erudite game, a fantasy, in which Cage pays homage to his artistic heroes. "It is possible to imagine that the artists whose work we live with constitute not a vocabulary but an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives," he wrote in his introduction to the text.
It's an alphabet that is often difficult to decipher. The script - a typographical arachnid with its spine of apparently random capital letters and vertebrae of half lines - resembles a musical score, and the sequences of juxtaposed voices reflect the composer's favoured non-method of "chance operations". In the stage version, which premiΦred last month at the Edinburgh International Festival, the text is often spoken by the characters simultaneously, so that the aural qualities of the radio play are retained, even heightened. It is not a text to be interpreted, but a series of sounds to be experienced. From Cage's original score, which he left in manuscript form, New York composer Mikel Rouse has created a soundscape of cued and background sounds, like a film score.
The dialogue is sprinkled with quotations from the historical characters, as well as fragments of adapted texts and words invented by Cage, in a playfully anachronistic mix. The living and the dead encounter each other, like ghosts, talking through and around each other.
Alphabet reflects some of the main preoccupations of Cage, whose influence has pervaded all the arts, especially painting and choreography, since the 1960s. His paradoxical insistence on chance procedures, on intentional non-intention, informed all his work, as did the emphasis on process rather than finished work, which has since become a commonplace of artistic practice, almost a clichΘ.
He was convinced that music "can be used to help people integrate their experience of daily life, rather than being used to nurture an aesthetically superior realm apart from the world". He constantly explored the relationship between art and life. For him there was no mysterious alchemy that transformed the raw material of experience into something transcendent called Art. The raw material, under intense scrutiny, was itself art.
The director and creator of the stage version is US musicologist Laura Kuhn, a former administrative assistant to John Cage who, since his death in 1992, has managed his artistic estate as director of the John Cage Trust. From a conversation with her between rehearsals of the Edinburgh production, it's clear she shares his fascination with collage and juxtaposition - which for him was the essence of Modernism. Her task was to find a theatrical analogue.
Cage conceived it as a poem, but staged the work could be viewed as a performed installation, she says, in which text is "spatialised". "I see it as a photograph that changes constantly, a tableau." Rather than trying to make concrete what the medium of radio left unspecific, she has chosen an abstract setting, designed by Marco Steinberg.
The characters sit at a distance from each other, largely stationary, with only the Narrator moving freely among them. They sit on the steps of four staircases with a luminescent finish, which are pushed together. Light bleeds through the steps, and apart from black benches there is no other decor. Lighting is used to create dawn and dusk, weather effects and a deep blue night. As in a dance production, areas of the stage, rather than bodies, are lit.
"It's simple and elegant," Kuhn says. "I wanted to have an abstract bareness that could suggest a graveyard. These empty spaces allow for the possibility of encounters between people from different periods. This is what theatre can do - where else could these people meet other than a stage?"
The other unusual encounters allowed for in this production are between actors and non-actors. In each venue in which Alphabet plays, local casts will be used to augment the travelling core. In Dublin, where the show is co-produced by the Dublin Fringe Festival, director Ali Curran advised Kuhn on the casting, but local cast members have had only a few days to rehearse.
"This means that the work is integrated into the place where it's performed and is slightly different each time," Kuhn says. "Of course the piece is made with these concerns in mind. The roles have be engaging enough for an actor but also feasible for a non-actor." Curran and Kuhn both agree that this approach is "very Fringe". It is also very Cage. With his openness to experimentation, his synthesis of high art and mass media, he could be viewed as the guiding spirit of all things Fringe. Perhaps he will join the other ghosts on stage on Monday for the Fringe Festival's opening night.
Alphabet opens at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD, on the first day of the Dublin Fringe Festival on Monday (until Wednesday). The Dublin Fringe Festival runs from Monday until October 13th. Booking: 2 Temple Bar Square, Dublin; tel: 1850-374643; website: www.fringefest.com. See also Weekend 12