WAITING FOR DAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 952, 8 November 1957, Page 26

WAITING FOR DAN

SAMUEL BECKETT’S play, All That Fall (1YC), had much the same effect on'me as "that blessed word, Mesopotamia" had on the old lady. I had only the vaguest idea what it meant, but found it absorbing. Whatever Mr Beckett is trying to say-if, in fact, he is trying to say anything beyond "Yah!" -he certainly knows how to handle words. As startling in its first impact as Under Milk Wood, All That Fall uses language as gnomic as Thomas’s is ornate, and as suggestive as his is rich. It spawns grey mists where Milk Wood shoots rainbows. Yet this odd play about a sorrowful Irishwoman waiting for a train and taking her morose, blind husband home, although crossed with talk of sterility, dung and young doom, with the tedium and pain of life, and with many hints of evil, did not leave me totally depressed. There was comedy in the church-haunting Miss Fitt, and pathos rather than. despair in Mrs Rooney’s "A little love-that’s all I ask," and "Be nice to me, Dan"; and, whereas the characters in Waiting for Godot seemed to me puzzling abstractions, those in All That Fall, although twitching in a ditch of dead leaves, were people one could sympathise with as individuals, Perhaps habitual listening to a certain highly-esteemed session explains my finding some of the lines ludicrous (Mrs Rooney’s "lifelong preoccupation with horses’ buttocks," for instance) and being reminded by the one-two-boom ambulatory effects of goonish pranks with coconut-shells. But, in general, the production was atmospherically excellent, and Mary O’Farrell’s Mrs Rooney is surely one of the truly great pieces of radio acting. Does one have to understand a play completely on at least one level to enjoy it? I could only make a stab at partial interpretation of this one. For instance, I feel that many of the images_

and allusions could be taken in a Christian sense, and that perhaps Mr Beckett is saying that, in this age of unaccommodated man, we need each other more than ever. But, whether there is a deeper meaning here or merely a mood, All That Fall entertains throughout. A blend of darker existentialism, Joycean realism, Irish caricature and music-hall humour, it flickers between sadness, gloom, longing, despair, nostalgia, acceptance and nihilism, yet in the end comes up with a synthesis of atmosphere I can only call Beckettian. : I want to encounter this bizarre, effective work ,again. In the meantime, a word of praise to the NZBS for letting us hear it so soon after its first broadcast in England earlier this year.

J.C.

R.