All That Fall

Very few people have seen this marvellous 1957 play by Samuel Beckett and very few ever will – thanks to the 'keep off the grass' attitude of the Beckett estate, which has refused numerous high-profile requests to stage it, because Beckett wrote it for radio. And there are no tickets left for its brief first run at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, where veteran director Trevor Nunn and stars Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon are forced to labour absurdly under its original intentions by semi-staging it with fake microphones, scripts in hand and a braying, clucking cacophony of rural sound effects.

That doesn't detract too much from the power of Beckett's extraordinary portrait of an elderly couple. The absurd labours of life are, after all, exactly what he wrote about with such unrivalled exactness, singularity, humour and – in this case – brevity. Atkins gives an exceptionally warm, open, funny, intelligent and disdainful central performance as Mrs Rooney, surmounting numerous comic obstacles on her way to the station to fetch her blind elderly husband (Gambon), a powerful, semi-coherent hulk of a man. The couple, with their arms around each other and their eyes on the void, are pure Beckett. But they totter home along a road that seems to belong in a more humanly detailed, more recognisably Irish country than the bleak mindscapes of Beckett's major works – 'Endgame' or 'Waiting for Godot' – and their sharply observed, beautifully played rural neighbours would fit in seamlessly to the rural comedy of Beckett's predecessors O'Casey and Synge.

What's truly absurd here is that the works of the most original playwright of the twentieth century are still so closed to the ideas of those who want to interpret them. Why can't we see actresses of Atkins's stature make the male-male couples of 'Endgame' or 'Godot' into male-female ones? Let's hope this staging – and the Beckett estate's failure in the Italian courts, in 2006, to prevent two women playing Vladimir and Estragon – is a sign that its iron grip is relaxing and the many people who aren't lucky enough to get a ticket to 'All That Fall' can look forward to more productions like this one.