Three Plays

Producing "plays for voices" in a theatre is not necessarily a bad idea, as Dylan Thomas and Charles Laughton, alone and with supporting actors, have proved and proved again. Samuel Beckett's All That Fall, the most important work on the Poet's bill, is avowedly a radio play. David Campton's two curtain-raisers, A Smell of Burning and Memento Mori, also depend almost entirely upon dialogue and sound effects. The faults of the three lie not in their form but in their functioning: though competently made and well staged and acted, their impact is weak.

This is especially regrettable in the case of Beckett's All That Fall. Since his Waiting for Godot, it is hard not to look at every succeeding lesser play as a lost opportunity for another masterpiece. Not that the new play is a total loss: many lines in it bear the authentic whiplash-imprint of Beckett's scathing wit or glow darkly with the grim beauty that only he commands.

But the dialogue is the only source of interest. There is hardly a plot: a sick, lonely, old woman struggles along a road to meet her husband at the railroad station; they start off, then stop to wrangle and reminisce. As for characterization, the minor characters are mediocre comic types, and the old couple merely querulous and sad. Waiting for Godot was even more deficient in plot and character, as these terms are usually understood, but the newer work somehow misses the odd, grim delightfulness that exempted Godot from all the usual demands that are made on a play. All That Fall should be worth reading, and even studying, but in the theatre it cannot always keep the attention from wandering.

The mood of the play is Beckett's familiar ravaging despair. Perhaps its climax occurs when the old woman quotes the Bible: "The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all that be bowed down"--and then bursts into wild laughter. The manner, on the other hand, is a new one for Mr. Beckett. All That Fall is set, not in the middle of nowhere, but quite recognizably in the Irish countryside. If you allow his characters the rhetorical skill and the comic eccentricities that everybody does allow the Irish, the play is not far from being realistic.

Campton's A Smell of Burning and Memento Mori diverge from realism to comic fantasy. They are short and slight in form, and amiably gruesome in tone. Both are clever jobs, but each is composed of one joke, not a very funny joke at that, spun out far too thinly.

It is not the fault of the Poets' if none of the three plays is very effective. The directors (Mary Manning for Beckett's, William Driver for Campton's) have not much opportunity to he helpful, since no movement at all is really necessary. But their efforts at staging are intelligently modest, and it must be credited to them that the performances are almost uniformly good. DeFrench and Greely Curtis are convincingly miserable in All That Fall, and William Driver and Hope Christopoulos do right by Cockney accents in A Smell of Burning. Stanley Jay gives the best performance of the evening in Momento Mori, playing an old man with a fine stooped shrillness.

If only the plays had a bit more meat on them, the evening at the Poets' might be more intriguing. As it is, the loyal circle of Beckett admirers will be interested in seeing for themselves, but there is not much to attract a broader audience than that.