All That Fall
Festival Beckett Unbound

The sonic experiments, discoveries and evolutions of Beckett’s radio play All That Fall (1956) led directly to the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Hungarian / British dramatist Martin Esslin commented that “Beckett and All That Fall thus directly contributed to one of the most important technical advances in the art of radio and the technique, and indeed technology, of radio in Britain.”

Besides Geistertrio, which features extracts from Beethoven’s Ghost Trio (Op. 70), All That Fall’s inclusion of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 (D.810) is the only other direction by Beckett for the use of a specific composition. This frames director Adrian Dunbar’s re-imagining of a radio play whose dark-driven conclusion is hardly credible after the preceding slapstick of ‘natural’ sounds.

Director: Adrian Dunbar
Actors: Orla Charlton, Anna Nygh, Frank McCusker, Vincent Higgins, Stanley Townsend, Frankie McCafferty, Kataulo Hickey M’Sichili
Sound Design: Simon Roth
Technical Director: Michael Cummins