Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play is proving astonishingly open to theatrical performance. Trevor Nunn staged it as a live-action drama and Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre sat us in semi-darkness listening to prerecorded voices. Max Stafford-Clark, in an Out of Joint production first seen at the Enniskillen festival, finds a third way here, by having a blindfolded audience listen to the story of Maddy Rooney trudging to a rural railway station to meet her blind husband off a train. It works brilliantly.
What hits you, especially in the first half, is Beckett’s graveyard wit which has the audience constantly chuckling. When a racecourse clerk offers Bríd Brennan’s caustic, needy Mrs Rooney a lift, he asks if she is going in his direction. “I am, Mr Slocum. We all are,” she replies with a hint of mortality. Yet seconds later we are into the realm of low comedy as we picture Mr Slocum shunting his overweight passenger into his car and announcing: “I’m as stiff as yourself.” Until the arrival of the train, the play offers a riotous re-creation of Beckett’s memories of his native village of Foxrock.
Wearing blindfolds forces us to listen more intently. I was especially struck not just by the tenacity of Beckett’s Protestantism but by his evocation of a past where the rural poor were steeped in books: the Rooneys dwell on Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Mr Rooney compares the two of them to “Dante’s damned, with their faces arsy-versy”.
This long-ignored piece strikes me as Beckett’s best play and in Stafford-Clark’s production, with its diverse aural decor and voices looming at us out of the dark, it comes to vivid life.
- At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 9 April. Buy tickets at the Guardian box office or call 0330-333 6906.
