FREE PROGRAM PROUDLY MADE POSSIBLE BY
SAMUEL BECKETT
ALL THAT FALL PAN PAN THEATRE IRELAND
SAMUEL BECKETT
ALL THAT FALL
OUT OF THE DARK: ALL THAT FALL ON STAGE
PAN PAN THEATRE IRELAND
EVEREST THEATRE SEYMOUR CENTRE 13–19 JANUARY 70MINS NO INTERVAL
CAST MRS ROONEY Áine Ní Mhuirí CHRISTY Phelim Drew MR TYLER Daniel Reardon MR SLOCUM David Pearse TOMMY Robbie O’Connor
DIRECTOR Gavin Quinn DESIGNER Aedín Cosgrove SOUND DESIGN Jimmy Eadie DRAMATURG Thomas Conway DESIGN ASSISTANT Grace O’Hara
MR BARRELL John Kavanagh
PRODUCTION MANAGER Rob Usher
MISS FITT Judith Roddy
STAGE MANAGER Tríona Humphries
A FEMALE VOICE Sarah Greene
SOUND ENGINEER Vincent Doherty
DOLLY Nell Klemen i
CHIEF ELECTRICIAN Barry Madden
MR ROONEY Andrew Bennett
PRODUCER Aoife White
JERRY Joey O’Sullivan
PUBLICIST Nick Costello
All photos: Ros Kavanagh
PAN PAN BOARD Jane Babb, Chrissie Poulter, Lesley McKimm, James Kelly & Colm O’Dwyer Pan Pan would like to thank Culture Ireland for their support of this tour. cultureireland.ie
The medium of radio exists on a strange border and Samuel Beckett continuously exploits its paradoxes in the composition of his radio plays. A voice comes to one in the dark, and the voice is both intimate and ubiquitous at once, the disembodied presence of a stranger in one’s own room. The history of radio has both solitary and communal modes of listening: although early units required headphones, it was not long before the wireless was a focal point for family life and recreation in the years before television. Though its pervasiveness didn’t kill audio-only media, television has made radio seem somehow old-fashioned. Digital culture in the current century has brought clearer sounds and more control, for both senders and receivers — the compact disc, the laptop, and the podcast give the user absolute control over selecting, starting and stopping the content. The conceptual innovation in Pan Pan’s stage production of All That Fall, Beckett’s first play for radio (written at the BBC’s suggestion in 1956 and directed by Donald McWhinnie), is thus really a throwback to its first broadcast on 13 January 1957: the fact that one must appear at a particular time and place in order to experience it. Today’s audiences at All That Fall, like that of the original broadcast, are no longer wholly in control and are listening together.
It may be seen as surprising that radio broadcasting continues to flourish in the twenty-first century at all. Certainly, the reasons are partly economic: radio remains the cheapest and most democratic form of mass media, with low operating costs relative to the number of people one antenna can reach. But the fact that television has not fully supplanted radio suggests that what audio-only broadcasting offers is substantively different than video, and apparently is even irreplaceable by internet. With only a few technological upgrades, this century-old technology has survived and maintained its own market, its own loyal adherents and its own reasons to be. Why is this? What is durable about radio as a broadcast medium might be the same fundamental principle that makes Samuel Beckett’s theatre different: the expressive power of absence. On the radio, it is precisely the invisibility of the bodies, the uncertain origins of the sounds, and the resulting instability of the stage world that work together to activate the imagination of the audience. The optimal way to experience radio drama, as many listeners of the BBC Third Program did habitually when these were first broadcast, was to sit in darkness for the entire piece, turning one’s room into a private theatre. Radio heard like this puts all the senses to work, because the only stage is the mind. Such active listening is less and less common now, however and the pace of life seems to agitate against it. These radio plays have already had radical adaptations each time someone has listened to them inattentively, has walked into a different room of
the house and thereby cut them, has been distracted by a phone call or has driven in traffic while listening to them. Against this drift, Pan Pan has carefully shaped a listening chamber that powerfully directs one’s focus to the texts, Beckett’s thought, and the performances of the actors. Director Gavin Quinn and designer Aedín Cosgrove have shaped the visual, tactile and even olfactory experience of the listeners in a way that draws attention without disturbing the disembodiment that is so fundamental to the pieces. Pan Pan’s faithfulness here to the sense of “occasion” of early broadcast media — a feature of Samuel Beckett’s own experience listening to the radio during the war, as well as the experience of his first listeners —complicates the inevitable questions of authorial fidelity. Beckett’s opposition to staging his radio plays is well known, and in the 55 years since the original broadcast, there have been a number of controversies over performances of All That Fall in Great Britain and worldwide. Writing to his American publisher Barney Rosset on 27 August 1957, Beckett was adamant that All That Fall is written “for voices not bodies,” and noted that his work for radio depends on “the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.” The same letter contains a widely quoted dictum taken by some to be his last word on adaptations: “If we can’t keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we may as well go home and lie down.” Nonetheless, there have been numerous stage presentations
of All That Fall since its composition. There is also good evidence that Beckett could not extricate his own works from the confusion of genre as the century wore on, and that for all his hyper-awareness of form, Beckett’s thought oscillated across many different media in his own drafting process. Pan Pan’s work — some of the most innovative and original in Ireland since the company’s 1991 founding — is nothing if not representative of the porous boundaries between visual art, sound art, theatre design, installation, live art and performance. In this sense, Pan Pan’s experiments with Beckett point toward a new horizon of the many possible future Becketts, a living legacy that is open to the imagination of alternatives while still being conscious of what is integral to his radical creations. Pan Pan is more alert than many other companies to the increasingly obvious fact that the choice between pure experimentation and keeping “faith” with authorial intention is, like all binaries, a Faustian bargain. It is not either/or, but both/and: Pan Pan’s productions are still partly “coming out of the dark,” and we are also asked to “listen to the light.” Nicholas Johnson Nicholas Johnson is a director, performer and teacher who works internationally with practice-based research on Samuel Beckett. He is director of Painted Filly Theatre and a co-founder of the Samuel Beckett Summer School, both in Dublin. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin.
GAVIN QUINN Director
AEDÍN COSGROVE Set & Lighting Designer
JIMMY EADIE Sound Designer
Gavin Quinn is the joint artistic director of Pan Pan Theatre, which he founded with Aedín Cosgrove in 1991. His productions include his own play A Bronze Twist of Your Serpent Muscles (named best overall production at the 1995 Dublin Fringe Festival); Cartoon; his own play Standoffish at the Adelaide Festival; Deflowerfucked; Mac-Beth 7; One: Healing With Theatre; The Playboy of the Western World in Beijing and Dublin, in Mandarin; Oedipus Loves You, which he co-wrote with Simon Doyle; The Crumb Trail; The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane, which won Irish Times Theatre Awards for best production and best set design in 2010; All That Fall at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Do Di Zhu (‘Fight the Landlord’) at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and at the 2011 Shanghai Expo; A Doll House at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, and the Brisbane Powerhouse; and Everyone Is King Lear In His Own Home at last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. His opera directing credits include Tom Johnson’s The Four-Note Opera, Ian Wilson’s Hamelin and Carmen for the Opera Theatre Company (OTC); The Magic Flute for OTC and English Touring Opera (ETO); The Abduction from the Seraglio for ETO at the Hackney Empire, London; and Così fan tutte for Opera Ireland.
Aedín Cosgrove co-founded Pan Pan Theatre with Gavin Quinn in 1991. Her design credits for the company include The Playboy of the Western World in Beijing; The Crumb Trail; The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane at the 2010 Dublin Theatre Festival, where it won Irish Times Theatre Awards for best set design and best production; Do Di Zhu (‘Fight the Landlord’) at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and the Shanghai Expo; All That Fall, for which she won the Irish Times Theatre Award for best lighting design in 2011; A Doll House at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin; and Everyone is King Lear in His Own Home at last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Her recent designs for opera and dance include Falling Song and Five Ways to Drown for Junk Ensemble; and Don Pasquale, Così fan tutte and Carmen for the Opera Theatre Company.
In addition to his work in sound design and production, Jimmy Eadie has released four albums with the band Into Paradise and a solo album under the name Amusement. He was a member of the Dublin band The Idiots, has released many recordings in collaboration with Irish artists, and has worked closely with the Crash Ensemble since 1997. As a sound designer he has worked with Rough Magic Theatre Company, Cois Ceim Dance, Dadgha Dance Company and RTÉ. He currently works at the Bow Lane Recording Studios in Dublin, where he has engineered and produced albums for numerous acts. He teaches at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Windmill Lane Academy, Dublin. He has worked with Pan Pan Theatre since its earliest productions.
PAN PAN THEATRE Since its formation in 1991 by the co-directors Gavin Quinn and Aedín Cosgrove, Pan Pan Theatre has constantly examined and challenged the nature of its work and has resisted settling into well-tried formulas. Developing new performance ideas is at the centre of the company’s work, which stems from a desire to be individual and provide innovation in the development of theatre art. All Pan Pan’s works are original,
either through new writing or through a unique interpretation of established works. The company approaches theatre as an open form of expression and has developed an individual aesthetic that has grown from creating performances in a variety of situations and conditions. Pan Pan performs nationally and internationally, developing links for co-productions and collaborations: it has toured in Ireland, the UK, Europe, the USA, Canada, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and China.
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FESTIVAL VILLAGE AT HYDE PARK
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