Over a decade ago I was at Wilton's Music Hall for the most fascinating production of Macbeth I have ever witnessed, a promenade production set in a war-torn African country and directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Well, he's back at WIlton's with a new show that was first seen at the Enniskillen festival last year. This time the historic East End venue, newly spruced up into respectable shabbiness after a long period of structural repair work, is staging a Samuel Beckett radio play.
Stafford-Clark is one of the great figures in British theatre over the past half century, though he and his Out of Joint company aren't the household names that they should be. I have no wish to detract from the work of writers such as Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker, but their classic plays Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Our Country's Good both emerged from workshops at the Royal Court led by Stafford-Clark.
All That Fall, which I saw at the Arts Theatre four or five years ago in a production with Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, was and still is a play for radio rather than the stage. Both Beckett and his heirs have blocked any full-scale stage version, a decision that seems to me entirely justified. The Arts Theatre production had the cast reading their scripts in front of old-fashioned studio microphones. On this occasion, Stafford-Clark has made the audience put on eye masks so that only the voices and the sound effects are heard. There is, as Stafford-Clark promised the Beckett estate, 'no vision at all'.
I found it quite invigorating to just use my ears for an hour to 'hear a play'. All That Fall is only of Beckett's most accessible works, an exploration in sound of the rural Ireland near Dublin that he remembered from his youth. But the story has a disturbing ending that prevents the entertaining story of Mrs Rooney (Brid Brennan) becoming nostalgic or whimsical. Best of all, the play has a soundscape of a real steam engine. I now know, having read Max Stafford-Clark's interview about the play, that he is an elderly model railway fanatic with his own train set, something I should have guessed when I saw his famous production of David Hare's The Permanent Way.
If anyone out there is writing a play about railways, you now know which director to send it to.
Comments