All That Fall, Pan Pan Theatre – review
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Version 0 of 1. When Samuel Beckett wrote his radio play All That Fall in 1956, we consumed audio works in an entirely different way. Now when we listen to radio, it’s often while we’re in transit: through headphones in the car, or squeezed onto public transport. Pan Pan Theatre’s production invites us to return to stopping still as we listen. We walk onto Aedín Cosgrove’s design, the floor covered in a children’s play carpet dotted with simple rocking chairs. On each seat a black cushion with a print of a skull, in front of us a large, tall bank of yellow lights, above our heads hundreds of yellow globes. There is something lovely in active listening with strangers. Some shuffle and reposition their bodies; a handful of chairs gently rock. Eyes drop shut and I suspect more than a couple of people have fallen asleep, lulled by the story. Some eyes wonder around the room catching other faces, or glancing up as lighting changes take us from sitting in the dark to sitting under a rainfall of glowing lights. We listen, sometimes attentively, sometimes drifting away, to the story of Mrs Rooney and her walk through to Boghill station to meet her husband. At first, the elderly woman, in a sterling performance by Áine Ní Mhuirí, seems mean, but as we listen Beckett shows us the quiet loneliness of a couple so wearied by the years that have passed them by. “Was I a hundred today?” Mr Rooney asks his wife. “Am I a hundred, Maddy?” When a train enters the station, Jimmy Eadie’s sound design rumbles up through the floor and into our chests. As a breath of wind rolls, a trail of lights illuminate. Footsteps fill the whole room. Largely, though, director Gavin Quinn creates a quiet affair of the script: frequently, we are left with nothing more than voices and conversations. There is nothing there to build a bigger world; it’s just them and us. As the show ends, there is silence. Part uncertainty if it is over; part respect for the quiet space Quinn has given to us. After a while, there is a soft clap from a handful of people. I sit a little while longer, wanting to hold on to the stillness and melancholy for just a few minutes more before I step back out into the world. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |