Eileen Atkins is a delight in Trevor Nunn’s production of Beckett’s ALL THAT FALL (photo by Carol Rosegg)

59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 8, $70
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

Children don’t fare very well in Trevor Nunn’s splendid version of Samuel Beckett’s 1956 one-act radio play, All That Fall. The seventy-five-minute absurdist black comedy, originally commissioned by the BBC, is about nothing less than life and death — well, mostly death. The delightful Eileen Atkins (The Killing of Sister George, A Room of One’s Own) stars as Mrs Maddy Rooney, a frail old woman going to meet her blind husband, Dan (Michael Gambon), at the local train station. Along the way she has encounters with Christy the dung slinger (Ruairi Conaghan), bicycle-riding bill broker Mr Tyler (Frank Grimes), racecourse clerk Mr Slocum (Trevor Cooper), Tommy the porter (Billy Carter), Mr Barrell the stationmaster (James Hayes), and young church spinster Miss Fitt (Catherine Cusack), all of whom speak — directly, indirectly, metaphorically, or metaphysically — about childlessness, conception, loss, loneliness, procreation, sterility, illness, suffering, time, and, primarily, death. There is talk of death of hens, dogs, flowers, sight, language, tires, mothers, fathers, and, especially, children. Even the soundtrack chimes in, beginning and ending with Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” Did we mention that this is a comedy? It is indeed, and a riotously funny one at that, centered on Mrs Rooney’s hysterical self-deprecating declarations of suffering. “What have I done to deserve all this, what, what?” she moans to Mr Tyler, later adding, “Have you no respect for misery?” “Do not flatter yourselves for one moment, because I hold aloof, that my sufferings have ceased,” she tells Miss Fitt, Mr Tyler, and Mr Barrell. Often it is as if Mrs Rooney is already dead or had never been born, a ghost watching the world go on around her. “Don’t mind me,” she says to Tommy and Mr Slocum. “Don’t take any notice of me. I do not exist. The fact is well known.” “Am I then invisible?” she asks Miss Fitt. (Yes, names such as Slocum and Miss Fitt ably describe the characters who wear them.)

Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins examine life and death in splendid absurdist comedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The doom and gloom reaches massive proportions when Mrs Rooney finally meets up with her endlessly cynical husband, who exclaims, “I have never known anything to happen.” He speaks of Dante’s damned, blancmanges, buttocks, and his own afflictions. “No, I cannot be said to be well. But I am no worse. Indeed, I am better than I was,” he explains to his wife. “The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred. Or have I done so?” Nunn, the former longtime Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director who has directed such widely diverse fare as Nicholas Nickleby, Starlight Express, The Coast of Utopia, and Cats, keeps things appropriately minimalist. The almost vaudevillian goings-on occur on Cherry Truluck’s spare stage, which consists of seven old-fashioned microphones hanging from the ceiling, the only prop a partial car door used for an inventive slapstick scene. The actors, who hold the script in their hands (but are not necessarily reading from them), sit in chairs on the sides of the stage when they are not involved; they can often be seen laughing at the proceedings, along with the audience. Paul Groothuis’s sound effects include overly loud footsteps, a speeding delivery van, wind, and other natural and unnatural elements. Atkins and Gambon (The Singing Detective, Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films) are utterly charming as the bitter old couple, playing off each other with a graceful familiarity, as if they have done this before; in fact, fifteen years ago they were the man and woman in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s The Unexpected Man, a two-character work set in a train compartment. All That Fall is rarely staged; Beckett said no to requests by Ingmar Bergman and Laurence Olivier, and the Irish playwright’s estate continues to carefully select companies who want to perform it. So it’s good news that it said yes to this wonderful production, which continues through December 8 at 59E59 Theaters.