I was recently sent a DVD of the BBC’s 1960s Shakespeare history cycle, An Age of Kings. On the cover is the face of a young woman with a sword, cropped hair and a fierce, uncompromising gaze. It is a young Eileen Atkins as Joan la Pucelle. There is something about those large eyes and that steadfast look that tells you that you are in the presence of a remarkable actor; and so it has proved in a career that has encompassed everything from Greek tragedy and Ibsen to Pinter and Albee, and that has led Atkins to be revered on both sides of the Atlantic.
If I single out Atkins’s performance as Maddy Rooney in Beckett’s All That Fall – seen in London and New York in 2012/13 – it is because it used all her skills.
Beckett’s play, first heard on radio in 1957, is a blessedly accessible piece about Mrs Rooney’s trip to a railway station to meet her blind husband and walk him home. It sounds simple but it is rooted in Beckett’s recollections of rural Ireland and combines earthy comedy with a meditation on death, dissolution and decay. All that was implicit in Atkins’s performance, which began with a long silent stare that suggested this was a woman who had known unspeakable sorrow, but who also possessed the resilience that is the key to Beckett’s characters.
The greatness of the performance lay in its ability to register, with a sublime economy, all the character’s mood shifts. There was a bawdy directness as Rooney told a racecourse official offering her a lift in his limousine: “You’ll have to get down, Mr Slocum, and help me from the rear.” Later, when a God-bothering oldster talked of the ecstasy of being alone with her maker, Atkins gave her a look of blood-freezing contempt.
And when Rooney was eventually reunited with her sightless husband (Michael Gambon), the two of them stumbled homewards in an unforgettable shared solitude. Realising that the local preacher’s text for the following day was to be “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down”, she relapsed into wild laughter.
Vanessa Redgrave seems to have direct access to some other world. Judi Dench has the capacity to merge laughter and tears in a single moment. The greatness of Eileen Atkins, who is their peer, lies in her uncanny emotional directness and her ability to make her eyes the window to her soul.
