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Shows Worth Seeing:
All That Fall
By Samuel Beckett
Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St.
(closed)
Samuel Beckett refused numerous requests to adapt his radio plays
for the stage—some from rather reputable people, like Laurence
Olivier and Joan Plowright. He said his radio works were written
to “come out of the dark” and couldn’t work
any other way, and since his death his Estate has assiduously
followed his wishes. Permission is granted only for faithful radio
productions or for staged readings in which producers agree to
limit the action to actors speaking the lines and walking to and
from chairs. The director John Sowle, in his current staging of
All That Fall (1957), Beckett’s first and most
populous radio drama, has cleverly identified a loophole in the
rules: since the play requires many elaborate and self-consciously
artificial sound-effects, the production of those effects can
become a spectacle in its own right. On stage at the Cherry Lane
are a wind-machine, gravel-trays, bells, coconuts, a stationary
bike and much more. Furthermore, the actors, who read in front
of old-fashioned mics, dressed in 1950s clothes, never acknowledge
the audience, even at the curtain call. The conceit is that they’re
performing a live sound-stage broadcast of the play on which we’re
eavesdropping. This doesn’t deliver quite the experience
Beckett had in mind, because the strange, imagined world of the
play is constantly competing with the actors’ decidedly
un-strange and demonstrative emoting and with the radio studio’s
nostalgic visual appeal. Nevertheless, the show develops a powerful
emotional tug of its own, largely because of a few wonderful performers—notably
Helen Calthorpe in the lead role of Maddy Rooney, Erik Kever Ryle
as Christy, and Steven Patterson as Mr. Barrell. These actors’
handling of Beckett’s marvelously extravagant language will
certainly send many searching for this still too-little-known
text. And by any fair measure, that does the author credit.
