Review: All That Fall, Old Vic Paintshop

On-demand technology has revolutionised radio drama. The BBC recently boasted of 1 million monthly radio downloads – with drama its most popular genre. New types of listener have emerged too, with Sunday evening marking peak download time as commuters prepare for their journeys to work.

But plays for radio remain a format most often enjoyed very privately. There are few more civilised or self-indulgent pleasures than to close your eyes, shut off the world and escape for an hour to the moon or the Matterhorn through the immersive power of sound. And whatever the increased chances of two workmates having heard the same episode of Pilgrim, they’ll still be discussing Game of Thrones at the water cooler the next day. 

Fascinating, therefore, is this production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall at Bristol Old Vic. When first performed in 1957, the play was praised as ‘the most important and irresistible new play for radio since Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood’. And a wonderful work it remains, far more easily digestible than you might expect from its author.

Its characters are warm, funny, detailed and human – but above them hangs a shard of darkness that glimmers coolly, almost undetected, dropping spectacularly at the end, shattering with it any twee bucolic flabbiness you had allowed yourself to enjoy. The cast are highly accomplished and their performances were laudable. But it is the nature of this production that is its most remarkable feature.

Beckett’s reluctance to see this work transposed to stage or screen is well documented. Out of Joint’s performance is one of a handful that have exploited loopholes in his proscriptions in order to ease public access to a play Michael Billington included in his 101 Greatest Plays.

At the door, audience members are handed blindfolds, which they wear throughout the performance. The effect, however, is not to accentuate the soundscapes created in and around the audience, transporting us more readily to the play’s rural Ireland setting – but to create a sense of illicitness about our involvement.

The blindfolds block out much of the action, but the powerful lights of the Old Vic’s Paintshop ensure that few audience members will have experienced total darkness without closing their eyes. It felt as if we had been admitted into an event on the condition we don’t participate fully; like a promo album interrupted by bleeping to prevent illegal copying, or an online art gallery that has embossed each picture with the word ‘sample’ to prevent home printing or exhibition. 

The effect is paradoxical: the audience is given privileged access to a rarely experienced great work; it sits in the thick of the action as the cast bellows and drags their feet inches away; it is deafened and disoriented by a steam train in the production’s most powerfully realised scene; but it is still fundamentally excluded from what transpires.

In its original form, the play would have been delivered directly, albeit over great distance, to the listener, and Beckett was concerned with that dynamic both as he wrote the script and considered its legacy. The play “has been tried in some out-of-the-way theatre, in the dark or with faces only lit, as required, but not much point in that,” he wrote in 1974. But we should be glad that here again a company has respectfully disregarded his position. This production both revives an otherwise too easily neglected work – and creates something new and unique in its own right. It’s voyeurism without the visuals, a great secret shared en masse.

All That Fall continues at Bristol Old Vic Paintshop until Saturday, March 12. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/allthatfall.html