FALL GUY: Trevor Nunn on taking Samuel Beckett radio play to the stage
Pictured Top: Michael Gambon in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Time
Pictured Bottom: Samuel Beckett
Published: 7 June, 2012
by GERALD ISAAMAN
One of the West End’s smallest theatres has pulled off a huge coup with the London premiere of All That Fall by the legendary Samuel Beckett and starring Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins.
They are to appear at the Jermyn Street Theatre, Piccadilly, in a much-awaited production directed by Trevor Nunn, which is due to run from October 9 to November 3.
The play, which has never been seen in London before, was specially commissioned by the BBC as a radio play and was first broadcast in 1957.
For Trevor Nunn it is the fulfilment of his ambition to present a stage version of Beckett’s extraordinary radio play and the smallness of the Jermyn Street studio space presents the ideal place.
“It is the perfect intimate space for this unique project, as I will be attempting to recreate the studio circumstances for which the All That Fall was written,” he explains.
“Most excitingly, this rare staging of a little-known Beckett masterpiece has attracted the involvement of two world famous actors, Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, to play the leading parts of Mrs and Mr Rooney.”
Not that the play, which shows Beckett’s links to the work of Sean O’Casey, covers a comfortable subject.
“It moves through comedic situations to a conclusion as disturbingly bleak as anything in his writing,” Nunn adds.
“My hope is that audiences won’t try to find and read the play beforehand, but come to it as if it is a new work about which they know almost nothing.
“The impact of this play will then be at its most devastating.”
Jermyn Street Theatre, which was named Fringe Theatre of the Year at The Stage 100 Awards earlier this year, has now proved yet again its enterprise.
The coup adds to the flair and enterprise of the Jermyn Street Theatre, originally created out of the changing rooms of a spaghetti restaurant in 1991. It was named Fringe Theatre of the Year in The Stage 100 awards earlier this year.
Artistic director Gene David Kirk says: “This is a quadruple coup for our theatre. A rare staging by one of the most influential figures of 20th-century theatre, directed by one of the most lauded directors of his generation, and starring two of the greatest actors working today. Anyone of those ingredients would have been massive for a theatre of our size. To have them together makes us immensely proud and excited. For a tiny auditorium in the heart of Theatreland, surrounded by the West End’s legendary playhouses, this proves that Jermyn Street Theatre delivers a punch far above its weight.”
• All That Fall opens at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 16b Jermyn Street, SW1, on October 9. Tickets will be on sale from September 3. www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk, 020 7287 2875