Beckett remade as a radio star

CULTURE SHOCK:'ALL THE DEAD voices," say Didi and Gogo in the most beautiful passage of Waiting for Godot. "They make a noise like wings." "Like leaves . . . " "Rather they whisper." "They rustle." "They murmur."

Dead, disembodied voices haunt Samuel Beckett's imagination: the old tapes that contain Krapp's former self; the recorded sound of her own voice that accompanies the woman's descent towards death in Rockaby; the "low, distinct, remote" woman's voice in Eh, Joe.There are all sorts of aesthetic and philosophical reasons for this fascination, but there is also a very simple explanation. Beckett comes from a generation for which the technologies of tape recording and radio were still relatively new. He does not take for granted the idea that we can hear the voices of the dead. The notion of spoken words floating in the ether, adrift from whatever moorings in real life they once had, still strikes him as extraordinary.

The lovely thing about Pan Pan's intriguing version of Beckett's radio play All That Fallat the Project in Dublin is that it lets us experience that sense of wonder too. The rustle and murmur of dead voices, now so familiar as to be unremarkable, are given back their haunting strangeness.

Beckett purists might well argue with the notion of putting All That Fall, written in English in 1956, and first broadcast by the BBC, into a theatre.

Beckett didn't write radio plays by accident. He worked successfully across more forms – poetry, short stories, novels, stage plays, TV, film and radio – than any other great writer has ever done. He chose those forms with great deliberation and exploited them with absolute precision. All That Fallis utterly and unalterably a piece for radio.

Yet some of the most interesting Beckett productions I've seen have broken the rules. I remember an astonishing Icelandic version of Not I, performed by a man for one person at a time – both breaches of Beckett's instructions.

The Gate's recent version of Eh, Joe, with Michael Gambon and Penelope Wilton, was mesmerising, even though it was a live staging of a TV play.

Conor Lovett's "readings" (in effect performances) of Beckett's trilogy of novels have been magnificent. So Gavin Quinn's decision to create a theatrical version of All That Fallis by no means without encouraging precedent.

The important question is why other departures from Beckett’s formal rules have been successful. The success doesn’t come from simply ignoring the author’s intentions and strictures. Rather, those strictures can act as a source of genuine creative tension. To put it simply, if you’re going to argue with the way Beckett saw his own work, you have to make a bloody good case.

You have to be able to use the friction to ignite some fire in the piece that would otherwise remain dormant.

Pan Pan's version of All That Fall, directed by Quinn and brilliantly designed by Aedin Cosgrove, fulfils this mandate. Firstly and most importantly, it respects the play for what it is: a soundscape of voices, noises and snatches of one piece of music, Schubert's Death and the Maiden. There is no attempt at staging, no notion of embodying the disembodied. There is just a self-conscious paradox – a radio play heard in a theatrical space.

That space, though, is very carefully conceived. The audience is not arranged in the usual rows of seats. Rocking chairs are set at apparently random angles to each other and to the walls. The cushions have an image of a human skull on them. The chairs sit on a carpet whose pattern is a stylised grid of a small town. The speakers hang to the right.

The wall to the front is covered in large yellow lights that dim and shine in complex patterns through the performance. The ceiling is hung with yellow bulbs like lemons on a radioactive tree.

This space is quite ingenious. It creates for the audience deliberately contradictory sensations. On the one hand, you can sink into your comfortable chair, at a distance from everyone else. You feel at home, free, at ease. You can close your eyes, rock to and fro and listen to the wonderful voices of Áine Ní Mhuirí as the old and corpulent Mrs Rooney, Andrew Bennett as her blind husband, Dan, and the rest of an excellent cast that includes John Kavanagh, David Pearse, Phelim Drew, Daniel Reardon and Judith Roddy.

But then the lights are eerily unsettling, constantly undermining the atmosphere of reverie, a reminder that you are in a very peculiar space.

This tension is perfectly judged – it is not enough to distract from the fine performances and Beckett’s bleakly funny text, but it is enough to justify the whole idea of listening to them inside a controlled and designed environment.

And the performance of the text is equally well judged. There’s enough warmth and individuality to distinguish the characters from each other, but there’s also the right flatness of tone to remind us that this is not pretending to be a slice of recorded reality. It is not aspiring towards the suspension of disbelief. Beckett is interested in something else entirely: the sheer ghostly strangeness of voices without bodies, of dead moments of time being resurrected at the flick of a switch, of bits of imagined lives being exhumed from the vaults of memory.

Quinn nicely emphasises the artificiality of the soundscape. The animal noises that are part of the sound effects are made with human voices.

Beckett uses self-consciously “bad” radio (“Heavens, here comes Connolly’s van!”) to play on our desire to conjure up images from mere words, and has the characters remark on the awkwardness of some of their phrases. These moments are very well used here to underline just how odd it is that we use such empty words to construct an imagined world.

And that is the point of this fascinating exercise. Radio drama isn’t the same for us now as it was for people in 1956. But Pan Pan has managed to re-create in a very different context the perplexing, chilling and disquieting experience of hearing dead voices emerge from an inanimate box.

Those voices sound again like wings or leaves.

fotoole@irishtimes.com; All That Fallis at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Friday