In fact, in September "he cancelled all his appointments in Paris for a week simply because he felt wholly incapable of facing people",[5] and worked on the script until its completion.
It was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 13 January 1957, featuring Mary O'Farrell as Maddy Rooney with J. G. Devlin as her husband, Dan.
In this case it is a gritty, "overwhelmingly capacious",[6] outspoken, Irish septuagenarian, Maddy Rooney, plagued by "rheumatism and childlessness".
Whilst relating how his daughter's operation has rendered her unable to bear children, they are almost knocked down by Connolly's van, which covers them "white with dust from head to foot".
[12] Maddy again bemoans the loss of Minnie but refuses to be comforted by Tyler, who rides off, despite realising that his rear tyre is flat.
At each stage of the journey, the technology she encounters advances but, despite that, each means of locomotion is beset by problems, foreshadowing the problem with the train: she finds walking difficult and is forced to sit down, Christy needs to whip his hinny to make her go, Tyler's tyre goes flat, and Slocum's engine dies.
At the station, Slocum calls on the porter, Tommy, for assistance to extricate his passenger, after which he drives away, "crucifying his gearbox.
We hear of the demise of Mr Barrell's father, who died shortly after retiring, a tale that reminds Maddy again of her own woes.
Her husband calls them a "precipice" and Miss Fitt compares them to the "Matterhorn", a mountain that for years inspired fear in climbers.
Dan imagines sitting by the fire in his dressing gown with his wife reading aloud from Effi Briest.
Apart from many uses of common Irish words and phrases, Beckett pulls names, characters and locations from his childhood to deliver a realistic setting for the drama, which is still presented in a manner almost everyone can relate to.
"All That Fall manages to develop a highly dynamic genre in radio drama through a multi-layered script, which can be read as tragicomedy, a murder mystery,[50] a cryptic literary riddle or a quasi-musical score.
(a pun evident earlier in the play) – together with Tommy’s cry: 'She’s coming!’ – and, on the arrival of the down train, the direction (thoroughly in the spirit of the one in Happy Days, which describes Willie as ‘dressed to kill’[72]), 'clashing of couplings'.
"[75] Beckett retained lifelong affection for Dante evident by the fact that his student copy of The Divine Comedy would be beside his deathbed in December 1989.
Rosemary Pountey goes so far as to tabulate the themes for both journeys showing the circular structure, even though "the play ends in a linear fashion":[80] A remark made by Professor Harry White about Beckett's later dramatic work gives an idea of the demands made upon the listener in this and his subsequent radio work: By comparing Beckett's work to that of serial composers such as Schoenberg and Webern, White highlights the difficulties for listeners who are obliged to actively engage with challenging new form and content.
Since the journey of the main character is presented psychologically, Beckett asked for natural sounds to be adapted in unnatural ways.
"New methods," Martin Esslin writes, "had to be found to extract the various sounds needed (both animal and mechanical – footsteps, cars, bicycle wheels, the train, the cart) from the simple naturalism of the hundreds of records in the BBC’s effects library.
They did so by treating them electronically: slowing down, speeding up, adding echo, fragmenting them by cutting them into segments, and putting them together in new way.
Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings ... will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing's coming out of the dark.
"[88] And yet despite this fact "Beckett authorised a French TV version adapted by Robert Pinget, shown on RTF on 25 January 1963.
Permission is granted only for faithful radio productions or for staged readings in which producers agree to limit the action to actors speaking the lines and walking to and from chairs.
The director John Sowle, in his [earlier, 1997] staging of All That Fall … cleverly identified a loophole in the rules: since the play requires many elaborate and self-consciously artificial sound-effects, the production of those effects can become a spectacle in its own right.
It starred Jillian Bradbury and was directed by Bill Gaskill with movement by Toby Sedgwick of War Horse fame.
Gaskill wanted to mount the production professionally in London the following year but was refused permission by the Beckett Estate.
Cesear's Forum, Cleveland's small minimalist theatre at Kennedy's Down Under, PlayhouseSquare, OH, presented the play in September 2010.
A recording of the play was broadcast into the empty theatre space where the audience sat on rocking chairs overlooked by a lighting array on one wall and lowly lit lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling.
Trevor Nunn's 2013 "landmark" stage production retained the concept of a radio studio, but introduced such props as the cab of Mr Slocum's car, thus permitting the visual comedy of the strikingly thin actor Eileen Atkins as she played the stout Mrs Rooney being manoeuvred in and out of the passenger seat for a lift to the station.
In 2016 Max Stafford Clark directed a version with the audience blindfolded for Out Of Joint Theatre Company which played the Enniskillen Beckett Festival, Bristol Old Vic and Wilton's Music Hall, London.
In March 2019 Dublin's Mouth on Fire Theatre Company also mounted a production where they asked the audience members to put on a blindfold or to close their eyes.
The President of Ireland and his wife Sabina Higgins attended the performance and invited the company to remount the production at Áras an Uachtaráin on Culture Night in September 2019, as the President's celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Beckett receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature and the thirtieth anniversary of his death.