AustLit

'A new work for radio by writer Paul Carter, who has created possible lives for Jean Du Chas, the founder of the mythical art movement of Concentrism as announced by Samuel Beckett in a hoax lecture delivered to the modern language Society of Dublin around 1930. Du Chas' art movement, Concentrism, could only have been conceived by one used to seeing circles of water radiating from a central point, a diver such as Jean du Chas - a high diver into the abyss of the unknown. Jean du Chas also shared Beckett's own birth date. He was a kind of fictional alter ego. In the vortex opened up by the whirling circles of the dive into which Jean du Chas plunged, he finds fragmentary facets of lives he might have led, lives which were concealed from him on the horizontal surface. Despite the kinetic imagery of Underworlds, the main figures, Jean du Chas and his two heteronyms, Hollow and Didi, are remarkable for their immobility. They are the philosophers of the beach, the unmistakable tramps, clowns and de-institutionalised mental patients familiar from playwrights as various as Artaud, Ionesco and Pinter.' (ABC Classic FM website)