British actors Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins are currently starring in Samuel Beckett's All That Fall, which opened on November 11 at the 59E59 Theater in New York. The production is fresh from London's West End, where it enjoyed a critically acclaimed, sold-out run.
Beckett wrote All That Fall in 1956 as a radio play about a combative married couple living in rural Ireland. Director Trevor Nunn adapted this play for the stage, but included some elements from its radio days, including microphones hanging from the ceiling and a red "On the Air" light on the wall. Sound effects, including the noise of livestock on the Rooney's farm, are used throughout the play.
Eileen Atkins, who plays Maddy Rooney in this production, is in her 6th decade of a career in theater, television, and film. She is known to Broadway audiences as Virginia Woolf in her one-woman performance of "Room of One's Own," and is also well-known for her roles in the movies Cold Mountain, The Hours, Cold Comfort Farm and Gosford Park.
Michael Gambon is perhaps best known for playing the wizard Albus Dumbledore in the last five Harry Potter films. He is also famous for his role as the lead character in The Singing Detective, a mini-series that aired on American public television in 1986.
Gambon and Atkins play a husband and wife who are combative, complaining, and present an all-too-familiar picture of an old married couple locked in ongoing war in which neither is willing to give in or admit fault.
Maddy leaves the farmhouse, cane in hand, intending to walk to the train station to pick up her husband Dan, who is blind. Along the way she meets various residents of the village, played by Ruairi Conaghan, Frank Grimes, Trevor Cooper, Billy Carter, James Hayes, Catherine Cusack and Liam Thrift.
Some offer to help her on her way, but their efforts to be helpful are lost on Maddy, focused as she is on her own problems, health and otherwise.
In one of the couple's less combative moments, Maddy repeats to Dan the text for that week's sermon at church: "The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down."
They both ponder these words for a moment, then break into hysterical laughter. In this shared moment of hilarity, they connect on a fundamental level that is utterly absent from their relationship during the rest of the play.
Laughter in the face of despair is a specialty of Beckett's. As theater critic Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times: "... though a starry Broadway revival of [Beckett's] masterwork "Waiting for Godot" opens later this month, you're unlikely to find a more salty or succinct embodiment of his fathomless sense of humor than this 75-minute production, directed by Trevor Nunn and first seen in London last year."
All That Fall will run until December 8. Thursday night performances will feature a post-show of live jazz in the E-Bar. For more information about this production, please visit 59e59.org.
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