Making the leap from radio to stage, Beckett’s “All That Fall” is a delight

Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins and Mr. and Mrs. Rooney in Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall. 

All That Fall
By Samuel Beckett
59E59 Theaters, New York

Five minutes into the production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall now playing at 59East59 Theaters in New York, I realized with some exhilaration that I was watching one of the greatest Irish plays I have ever seen.

But All That Fall was never supposed to be seen. Beckett wrote the play for radio in 1956.
It was the celebrated British director Trevor Nunn who had the inspired idea of staging it, referencing its radio origins with actors carrying scripts onstage and speaking below overhead microphones.

The play opens with a signature of rural Ireland, the sound of barnyard animals braying and clucking.  Onstage Eileen Atkins appears as Maddy Rooney, a frail septuagenarian in a broad brimmed hat, came to meet her blind husband Dan (Michael Gambon) at the railway station.

A characteristic Beckett creation, Mrs. Rooney is a pincushion of ailments and angst whose halting progress is further hampered by the series of Irish eccentrics she meets along her way.

As painfully self-aware as the incomparable Dubliner who created her, Mrs. Rooney refers to herself at one point as “a hysterical old hag” and later notes, “I estrange them all.”

But in Beckett’s script and in Atkins’ hands, this painful self-awareness manages to be both sobering and hysterically funny.  The Irish are famous for their gallows humor, and Beckett’s is inarguably the most precise and brilliant example of the art form that the nation ever produced.

Not much actually happens in All That Fall. Mrs. Rooney has some brief discussions with the people she meets, she accepts a lift without offering thanks, she complains at length of her growing infirmities, and at last she arrives late to the station for the train that also arrives late.

But it’s on the road home that the darkness which haunts the edges of this brutally funny play falls, startling us with it its mystery and dread.

There isn’t much that separates us from the antics of the barnyard, bar the passing of time and a growing sense of futility. That could be funny or that could be terrifying, depending on how you look at it, and Beckett looks at  it both ways with his lighthouse glare. The braying and clucking animals are us, it turns out.

Onstage actor Billy Carter, most recently seen in The Weir by Conor McPherson at the Irish Rep, plays Tommy, one of Mrs. Rooney’s tormentors.

“This has been a big year for me,” he tells the Irish Voice. “I moved over and got my green card this year. I arrived here in March and met Ciaran O’Reilly and then The Weir happened. I thought it would only last for a month but it ended up going for four or five months. Then just before The Weir ended I got this.”

Carter says he has always been shy of Beckett, but when the part came up he jumped at the chance.

“When I got the offer to come over they told me I couldn’t learn my lines. It was a hot ticket in London,” he says.

“To have Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon onstage together, the pairing of those two was just so rich. The Beckett estate is so rigorous about what goes on, so the fact that Trevor Nunn convinced them to allow us to make All That Fall a performance, even though we’re holding scripts onstage and though we perform it in a sound studio set, it really fits with that Irish setting.”

In New York the audiences have really taken to the production and the reviews have been terrific. For an actor from Ireland it’s the best kind of exposure.

“You’ll never see this production again. To hear it live and see it like this is a one off. It’s so rich in terms of story telling,” Carter says.

Toward the end of the play Beckett undercuts the brittle humor and eloquence with a dramatic development that takes the breath out of the viewer.

Gambon and Atkins joltingly remind us that the suffering Beckett is speaking of is not only abstract but concrete. You can laugh or you can cry, but you can’t hope to outrun it. As the light ebbs so too does the hope that we’ll remain untouched.

All That Fall is playing at 59East59 Street Theaters until December 8. For tickets call 212-279-4200 or visit www.59e59.org.

Peter Quinn's new book 'Dry Bones' asks hard questions

Peter Quinn's new book

It can be a murky business, living, and no one knows it better than Fintan Dunne, Peter Quinn’s incomparable Irish American detective.

In Dry Bones, the third and easily the finest part of the trilogy Quinn started with The Hour of the Cat, the author has crafted a cinematic spy tale that is crying out for the big screen (and may in fact appear there).

Set in the aftermath of World War II in a Europe overrun by the Red Army, Quinn’s gift is to tell a you-are-there tale of a disastrous Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) mission into the heart of the Eastern front, which unexpectedly comes back to haunt him over a decade after it ends.

But first Dunne and his compatriot Dick Van Hull (who can find poetry in even the most extreme situation) volunteer for a dangerous mission behind enemy lines, with a plan to rescue a team of OSS officers who have been trying to help the Czech resistance.

Along the way Quinn, who can make history blaze to life in a paragraph, tells the fascinating story of the immediate aftermath of the Nazi nightmare, sending Dunne to the epic rally grounds drafted by Albert Speer, where eight years earlier Hitler had incited Germany to wage unprecedented slaughter.

Collapse and crisis haunt Europe and every page of Dry Bones, as do the endless pyres of the innocent dead, in a tale that begins to put quotation marks around the “greatest generation.”

As they embark on their secret mission Dunne and Van Hull uncover a shocking secret involving a Nazi doctor nicknamed the Blue Devil that changes both of their lives. But with military forces closing in their daring plan unspools, and Dunne’s participation ends with typhus and a broken ankle.

A discovery this shocking isn’t likely to stay interred of course, and 10 years later Dunne’s past catches up with him. Into his life comes the razor sharp and delightfully eccentric Turlough Bassante, with new information about the Blue Devil.

In recent years we have had many memorable illustrations of the dangers of becoming the thing we originally opposed. What we call a concern for national security, we are continually discovering, can actually just be an expression of our fear.

In Dry Bones that illustration is named Dr. Karsten Heinz, the escaped war criminal who once supervised terrifying medical experiments on helpless concentration camp victims.

Ten years later Dunne discovers that Heinz and many other former Nazi scientists and technicians are being imported by the U.S. government to help in the new fight, which this time is against communism.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, the old adage says. But even when he’s a Nazi? Surely that’s a bridge too far?

How could the men hand picked by Hitler to torment and kill millions be awarded with highly paid new careers in America? Doesn’t that mean collusion at some level? Doesn’t that infer that you are in some way becoming the foul enemy you originally opposed?

There are hard questions asked in Dry Bones, in a tale that unfolds against the backdrop of silent witnesses to the charnel house that was the 20th century -- the men women and children who make up the countless dead.

In Quinn’s book, as in life, good men don’t always make good. Van Hull is diminished by what he witnesses, becoming a shadow of his former self when Dunne meets him 10 years later.
By 1958 things have changed for both men, but when an old crony emerges with information on Heinz’s whereabouts the tale really hits high gear.

In prose clear as cut glass Quinn shows us, with judicious restraint, just how connected the human family is, with increasingly unnerving implications. The Irish have a saying, we all live in each other’s shadow, and in Dry Bones this double-edged awareness is at the center of his tale.

Quinn takes us back into the shocking, chaotic and lethally dangerous months after World War II in Europe and shows himself to be the ideal tour guide. After the bombing of Nuremburg, with the absurdity and hubris of Nazism finally interred, real justice is still elusive and may always remain so.

In Dry Bones, this turns out to be the most shocking surprise of all. This is a provocative and immensely thoughtful thriller.

Overlook Press, $25.95

Eamon Morrisey’s “Maeve’s House” not too open

Eamon Morrissey.

Maeve’s House
Written and performed by Eamon Morrissey

The Ireland that Irish writer Maeve Brennan left behind never really left her. No one knew this better than she did. In later years in New York she referred to herself as a “traveler in residence,” a nod to the fact that although she’d journeyed far from her first home in Ranelagh, South Dublin, it had already shaped her outlook and interior life.

In 1934 Brennan’s father was appointed the Republic of Ireland’s first minister to the United States, so her family had moved to Washington, D.C. and her new life as a reluctant American began. But it is interesting that in her art as well as her life, she never quite surrendered to her adoptive country, instead remaining at a critical tangent, as though she were afraid to lose something.

In Maeve’s House, the new show written and performed by noted actor and writer Eamon Morrissey and commissioned by Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, we are re-introduced to this flinty and fastidious short story writer through a series of impressionistic biographical tales and excerpts from her works.

In a detail that in part explains his lifelong fascination with her, Morrissey coincidentally grew up in the same Dublin house as Brennan many years later and was riveted to see it meticulously described in her work. That connection encouraged him to seek her out here in the 1960s when he was starring in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come on Broadway.

But there’s much more to Morrissey’s fascination with Brennan than that. He’s an admirer of her career as a trailblazing Irish writer in the U.S., and his one-man show is part celebration and part rescue mission, to acknowledge her achievements and to salvage her luminous work from the obscurity that threatened to engulf them.

Maeve’s House certainly reminds us how well Brennan could write. Morrissey quotes liberally from her short stories and her celebrated New Yorker columns, and in the process this most exacting of writers reemerges in all her brittle glory.

The show reminds that Brennan’s characters are most often a luckless lot. Lives are lived in domestic drudgery, grudges are nursed for a lifetime, women and men find few points of contact but multiple points of conflict, and nothing is ever what it seems on the surface.
Through it all blazes her lighthouse intelligence, but her gloomy view of life and the restrictions it places on us often make for tragic reading.

Morrissey’s one-man show really unfolds like a private reminiscence more than a play. It’s quiet, intimate and reflective, which suits its subject’s prose style but perhaps not the theater.

Morrissey tells us he met Brennan in the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan in the 1960s, having been compelled to meet her after reading her writing about his childhood home. But he came away from their meeting slightly awed, the play tells us, uncertain of who she was as a person or in the precise nature of his interest in her.

A person as elusive and accomplished as Brennan makes for a fascinating subject, but in Morrissey’s script we only catch glimpses. It’s in Brennan’s own words that the play comes to life. Her scalding portraits of lives half lived have lost none of their potency, and Maeve’s House is most effective when the words are her own.

Director Gerard Stembridge does well to keep the pace with a script that relies solely on the word and not the image, but there’s no event here, there’s no sense of urgency, there’s certainly no theatre.

Brennan was brilliant and beautiful. She crafted a celebrated career in an age when Irish women of her era were seen as incubators for the state and not much else. She did mostly it on her own and she won serious admirers for her efforts.

Wasn’t that utterly remarkable? Could a drama not be crafted out of that?

What happened to Brennan – her mental deterioration, the lonely life she lived that went on and on – is certainly worth our investment, but Maeve’s House has little enough to say on the subjects.

Instead the play turns to her writing, which for its daring and insight, ranks among the most brilliant disavowals of the conservative Catholic Republic that the nation had become, and which Brennan monitored ceaselessly from overseas (where she certainly had a better vantage point).

Brennan was a tough and pitiless writer, compassionate and kind certainly but bracingly unsentimental. Her words burnish this meditative and slow moving play, and only when they arrive does it blaze to life.

Maeve’s House is playing at Irish Arts Center in New York until November 10. For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishartscenter.org.