All That Fall - Staged Productions

Staged Productions

Beckett conceived All That Fall as a radio play. To Beckett’s mind it was unthinkable to transfer it to another medium and yet it was done, and in his lifetime.

Beckett admonished Barney Rossett, on 27 August 1957, saying of All That Fall: "It is no more theatre than Endgame is radio and to 'act' it is to kill it. Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings ... will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing's coming out of the dark. And yet despite this fact “Beckett authorised a French TV version adapted by Robert Pinget, shown on RTF on 25 January 1963. A German stage production was given at the Schiller-Theatre, Berlin in January 1966; Beckett was not happy with either.”

“When … Ingmar Bergman asked if he could stage both radio plays, All That Fall and Embers, the answer was a firm ‘No’".The same went, in 1969, when Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife visited him to persuade him to allow them to produce a version at the National Theatre. “They had refused to accept his written refusals and made the trip … anyway. There he greeted them with politeness and offered limited hospitality, but remained steadfast in his decision.”

“ince his death Estate has assiduously followed his wishes. Permission is granted only for faithful radio productions or for staged readings in which producers agree to limit the action to actors speaking the lines and walking to and from chairs. The director John Sowle, in his staging of All That Fall … cleverly identified a loophole in the rules: since the play requires many elaborate and self-consciously artificial sound-effects, the production of those effects can become a spectacle in its own right. On stage at the Cherry Lane are a wind machine, gravel-trays, bells, coconuts, a stationary bike and much more. Furthermore, the actors, who read in front of old-fashioned mikes, dressed in 1950s clothes, never acknowledge the audience, even at the curtain call. The conceit is that they're performing a live sound-stage broadcast of the play on which we're eavesdropping.”

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) was granted permission to stage 'All That Fall' in the Summer of 2008.

Pan Pan, an Irish theatre company, staged the play in August 2011 in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. A recording of the play was broadcast into the empty theatre space where the audience sat on rocking chairs overlooked by a lighting array on one wall and lowly lit lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. This production was intended to provide a shared theatrical experience while preserving the wishes of the author.