All That Fall at Wilton’s Music Hall, E1

reviewed for The Times, 28th March 2016

Samuel Beckett’s heirs are known for maintaining the ban on women performing his male roles. They also deter directors from veering from the original conception of this dark vignette as a radio play, commissioned by the BBC in 1956. So the Out of Joint impresario Max Stafford-Clark invites us to listen, from under blindfolds, to this Irish tale of Mrs Rooney’s harrowing trip to a rural train station.

Just a month after Simon McBurney harnessed modern audio technology to create the cult soundscape of The Encounter, Out of Joint instead offers us something reassuringly old-fashioned. It’s an aural experience straight out of Ambridge, as pram wheels mimic a horse cart and reedy voices echo around the cavernous ceiling of the much-loved Wilton’s Music Hall. The result is surprisingly beguiling.

As narrative goes, this is effectively a short story. Old Mrs Rooney, her joints creaking and her mind wandering, makes the gruelling journey to the station to surprise her blind husband on his commute home. It is also a man’s surprisingly empathetic vision of the female condition, if empathy coexists with Beckett’s obsession with withered ovaries. Rooney imagines her long-dead daughter, had she made it to middle age, “girding up her lovely little loins for the change”; one of the locals she encounters mourns his own daughter’s hysterectomy in grotesque detail.

In the voice of Bríd Brennan, however, even Beckett’s earthier images shimmer with subtle beauty. As her husband, Gary Lilburn also impresses, as blinkered as the audience under his character’s dark glasses (I peeked). An hour under a blindfold won’t be for everyone. Divorced from distractions, it’s an exercise in concentration, even for theatre. Yet in our era of grasshopper attention spans, that is surely an experience to be cherished.