It’s been over two weeks since I saw the British production of All That Fall at 59E59, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Rarely have I seen a Beckett play performed so movingly or so delicately.
What Trevor Nunn’s production has going for it is that it both honors and transcends the script’s origins as a radio play. First performed in 1957, All That Fall is in many ways more naturalistic than the more familiar Beckett stage works. It features smalltown Irish voices essentially going about their daily business. Mrs. Rooney, an elderly, perhaps overweight, certainly rheumatism-ridden woman, makes her way to the local railway station, where she meets the incoming train of her blind husband, Mr. Rooney, and brings him home. Nothing much, and nothing terribly shocking or surreal. But the bite of the sorrow, when it enters in, is severe, and the pain of existence ever-present.
The Beckett estate has held closely to this work, refusing to allow it to be performed as an actual stage play. I first read it in the early 1990s, when I was following around the director Stephen Daldry, who wanted to put it onstage (he never managed to). Last year I attended a version at BAM’s Fisher Theater which seated the audience in rocking chairs and left them in the near-dark to listen to recorded Irish voices. It made the play seem so tedious that I would have hesitated to give it another try, had it not been for the presence of Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon in the 59E59 performances.
And their presence is really what made the play. Trevor Nunn staged it as a radio play being recorded live, which meant the actors all carried scripts and spoke into dangling microphones. There was a trace of scenery—a tubular object which could serve as a car (Mrs. Rooney hitches a brief ride into town) as well as a generalized piece of the derelict landscape. And we could see the actors, live, as they waited quietly on the sidelines and then moved centerstage to speak their lines. It was especially important to be able to watch Eileen Atkins, who was onstage the whole time, and who brought to this central role all the capacities of her expressive face, voice, and body. As she interacted with various townspeople on her way to the train station (there are about five smaller parts in addition to the two main ones), many small, engaging, humorous moments mingled with the prevailing sense of despair; at such times, the play was almost fun, the audience rejoicing audibly in its collective appreciation.
And then, as Michael Gambon stepped into his role from his chair on the side of the stage, the emotion darkened and the audience fell completely silent. This great actor has recently reported problems with his memory: he has had to cease performing regular dramatic roles, resorting only to non-speaking characters or to the rare part like this, which allowed him to read from a script. Yet this very handicap intensified his performance, causing us to wait breathless on the edge of our seats, hanging on his every word. It was as if the blindness of the fictional Mr. Rooney had been transmuted into the stage-fright and memory-loss of the actual Michael Gambon, so that the guiding hand of Eileen Atkins (who, in true trouper fashion, here took on a literally supporting role) was necessary to get him through the part. The section of the play in which Mr. and Mrs. Rooney alone held the stage—that is, roughly the last third of this seventy-five minute script—was among the finest twenty-five minutes I have ever seen in live performance, anywhere. You could sense the palpable suffering shared between these two people; you could feel his lostness and fear, her cranky but affectionate sorrow. And you could hear the words Beckett wrote, almost as if they were taking shape in the air like a thick atmosphere surrounding, and in effect giving rise to, these inimitable, pathetic, valiant characters. It was magnificent.