All That Fall – Abbey Theatre – Review by Shane Larkin

11th – 20th Feb

Out of the dark and into our minds, old Maddy Rooney emerges. Wheezing and dragging her feet along a dusty country road amidst the clucking and bleating of farm animals, and the faint, sad sounds of music from a nearby house. It’s her blind, belligerent husband Dan’s birthday, and she’s going to meet him at the train station. The train is uncharacteristically late. With All That Fall, Samuel Beckett demonstrated an uncanny understanding of radio’s potential to explore the drama within the protagonist’s mind, and to portray ethereal mental processes in a very direct way. Pan Pan Theatre’s widely praised production, running now until the 20th of February at the Abbey, goes some ways towards honouring the man’s wishes that the play not be staged conventionally, while at the same time confronting us with a compelling statement on the act of listening itself, uninterrupted and communal. It’s a strange and unforgettable sensory experience.

Residing somewhere between installation, performance and visual art, director Gavin Quinn’s unique production occupies an immersive liminal space of soft darkness and impressionistic light, silence and sound. Seated on the stage of the Abbey itself, a wall of amber lamps faces the audience, taking on forms both intangible and slightly less-so (they recreate the impression of an oncoming train’s blinding light flooding the field of vision at one point, for example), either softly drifting in and out of the darkness or startling us to attention. Bulbs of orange light hang unevenly overhead. One of those children’s play carpets lines the floor, and the audience sit in rocking chairs adorned with skull-decorated cushions, immediately conjuring the tension between youth and decay, impermanence and vibrancy, that will fully permeate the next 70-odd minutes of the pre-recorded performance.

Ably abetting Aedín Cosgrove’s ingenious stage and lighting design is the work of sound designer Jimmy Eadie, and Quinn’s actors perform fitfully in tune to Beckett’s masterful shifts in tone, going from existential despair to outright hilarity in the middle of the briefest of exchanges. Mrs Rooney, as played by Áine Ní Mhuirí, is a self-pitying, sorrowful, heaving, lumbering force of nature. Her thoughts and ramblings as she struggles to and from the station range from the lyrically sad to the hysterical. She derisively describes herself as “destroyed with sorrow and pining and gentility and churchgoing and fat and rheumatism and childlessness”, but retains a caustic sense of humour about it all. Andrew Bennett is all snarling bitterness as Mr Rooney, content to wallow in misery and potentially harboring a deeply sinister nature.

To reveal more would spoil the experience. Thoughts and mysteries and revelations weave in and out of focus, like the florid haze of filament above our heads. The feeling upon exiting that atmospheric chamber of sound and light into the world outside was quite a jarring one. The lights came up for the last time, people started to glance around cautiously and a stilted applause rippled across the stage. Even aside from the peculiarities of the setting itself, it was clear that the final moments of the piece were weighing heavily. It’s not often you come across a production that leaves you not quite sure what to do with yourself once it’s over.