For the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, this is a real coup: an obscure Samuel Beckett play directed by Sir Trevor Nunn and starring a theatrical knight and dame in the shape of Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins.
All That Fall was written for radio and first broadcast in 1957. Here it gets a staged reading rather than a full production. The actors have scripts in their hands, but there’s exuberance as well as soulfulness in Nunn’s interpretation.
Beckett was interested in the musicality of radio drama, and claimed All That Fall would work only if “the whole thing’s coming out of the dark”. The main challenges for the cast are vocal. At times they resemble musical instruments, and the language is artfully orchestrated, an arrangement of carefully achieved shifts and inconsistencies.
Atkins brings a mixture of frailty, sharp wit and quirkiness to Maddy Rooney. This mature, plodding woman struggles to get to the station to pick up her blind husband Dan, whose birthday it is. Her encounters with other men en route are opportunities to reflect on decline and decay. “I estrange them all,” she says.
Maddy speaks with poetic elegance. Melancholy and images of loss — especially of untimely death — mingle with bleak humour. The sounds of animals and the wind are frequently audible, but it seems as if Maddy is conjuring the haunted soundscape of rural Ireland rather than observing it. Despite appearances, we feel she is very much alone, and Atkins beautifully conveys her fearfulness, gloom and zany individuality.
Gambon’s Dan is angry, even callous, a misanthrope whose thoughts have a tendency to evaporate the moment they are spoken. The part is not big, yet there’s time for his voice to work its charm — that distinctive blend of gravel and lushness. It is delightful to see how much Gambon, when sitting on the sidelines, savours the details in Atkins’s performance.
All That Fall may be important in the history of radio drama, but it’s still pretty minor Beckett. Nevertheless it is an interesting combination of mystery, love story and grotesque experiment which makes for an intense, ultimately ambiguous hour and a quarter.
Until November 3 (Returns only. 020 7287 2875)
