Abstract: This article considers the transmedial characteristics of the radio play First Night Closing Night, the radiophonic adaptation by George Tabori and Jörg Jannings of a short story by Tabori about the rehearsals for a performance with a deadly outcome. The story addresses political, ethical and aesthetical issues: it considers the coerced collaboration of the narrator, a stagehand of the director, in the deadly staging of a theatre play. In comparison with the narrative structure of the prose text the article analyses several aspects of the multilayered acoustic presentation of this complex problem in the radio play, such as the pathos of the spoken voice and the rehearsal of a song as part of the soundscape. The article argues that the use of these specific radiophonic features both increases the complexity of the central issue – the complicity of the stagehand – and suggests a tentative form of resistance against the deadly perfection of the play.

Keywords: George Tabori – radio play – audionarratology – unnatural narratology – transmediality