Pan Pan Theatre Company's production of Samuel Beckett's radio play All That Fall is a uniquely synesthetic experience of radiophonic theatre on stage with pre-recorded voices and intriguingly shifting lights and sounds. It poetically circumvents Sam's insistence on not having his radio plays staged due to what he considered to be their acutely medium-specific character.
We walked our way into the auditorium and cut through the regular seats for the audience to go straight up on to the stage where the curtain had a little mouth (or Mouth?) to suck us in.
There we were: the entire audience right on the stage, seated on Beckettian rocking chairs and the auditory drama began. The inspiration was perhaps Ionesco's The Chairs with all those empty chairs on stage. The text was punctuated with lighting which indexed the different moments of encounters inside the text. The glaring yellow lights through holes, we faced kept coming and going. To add to that, there were the beautiful drizzle-like overhead lights and the footlights from our back. The lights at the front generated complex patterns on their own, often reminding me of the melodious flute in which different holes are activated at different points to produce the tune.
The sounds were in swing with Beckett's instructions; the acting as invocation was spot on, striking the right balance between an overstated hysteria and an understated pathos alongside a mix of heady laughs, as always with Beckett.
I liked this one more than their recent Beckett production Embers, I saw last year in Dublin. The huge skull on stage in Embers had divided the impact between the auditory and the visual. With All That Fall, I thought they stuck to the radical edge of performance which playwrights like Beckett demand and dared to transform the stage into a curiously intimate and yet collective hearing chamber and for me that is putting the right emphasis as far as Beckett is concerned.
All in all, a spectacular and spectral hearing!
We walked our way into the auditorium and cut through the regular seats for the audience to go straight up on to the stage where the curtain had a little mouth (or Mouth?) to suck us in.
There we were: the entire audience right on the stage, seated on Beckettian rocking chairs and the auditory drama began. The inspiration was perhaps Ionesco's The Chairs with all those empty chairs on stage. The text was punctuated with lighting which indexed the different moments of encounters inside the text. The glaring yellow lights through holes, we faced kept coming and going. To add to that, there were the beautiful drizzle-like overhead lights and the footlights from our back. The lights at the front generated complex patterns on their own, often reminding me of the melodious flute in which different holes are activated at different points to produce the tune.
The sounds were in swing with Beckett's instructions; the acting as invocation was spot on, striking the right balance between an overstated hysteria and an understated pathos alongside a mix of heady laughs, as always with Beckett.
I liked this one more than their recent Beckett production Embers, I saw last year in Dublin. The huge skull on stage in Embers had divided the impact between the auditory and the visual. With All That Fall, I thought they stuck to the radical edge of performance which playwrights like Beckett demand and dared to transform the stage into a curiously intimate and yet collective hearing chamber and for me that is putting the right emphasis as far as Beckett is concerned.
All in all, a spectacular and spectral hearing!
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