“Beckett at his most Irish and accessible… at his most beguiling.” – The Guardian

“...a triumph…for the singular art of Beckett, who always finds the ecstasy in our agony.” – The New York Times

Springing out of memories of his native Foxrock, near Dublin, All That Fall charts the journey of Maddy Rooney along a country road to the railway station to meet her blind husband off a train. On the course of her travels, she meets a carter, a businessman, a racecourse clerk and a stiffly Protestant spinster. But the train she has come to meet is detained. When it finally arrives, we uncover the train’s mysterious delay.

First broadcast by the BBC in January 1957, All That Fall is a model in the combined use of sound, music, and speech. The play’s mythic side, its sense of eternity within the everyday, grows more naturally in our imaginations as the story unfolds.

All That Fall was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races. Published in French, in a translation by Robert Pinget, it was revised by Beckett himself as Tous ceux qui tombent.

Beckett wrote to his friend Nancy Cunard: "Never thought about radio play technique but in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging of feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something."

Although the play was written quickly and with few redrafts, the subject matter was deeply personal causing him to sink into what he called "a whirl of depression" when he wrote to his US publisher Barney Rosset in August. In September he cancelled all his appointments in Paris for a week simply because he felt wholly incapable of facing people and worked on the script until its completion.

Join us for this rarely-produced feast for the senses. Blindfolds provided, and optional.

The mission of the IRC is to bring the classics of absurdist theatre to an international audience within the Philadelphia region. We are dedicated to presenting rarely produced, renowned plays that explore and illuminate the human purpose, creating a dialogue with the audience about the relevance and impact of the human condition in our contemporary world.

We are committed to creating theater that is intelligent and thought-provoking. Through performances that are ironic, buoyant, and infectious, the work is designed to displace and transform the audience’s perspective, using language in combination with an entire sensory experience to express ideas that words alone cannot convey. With our dedicated group of artists, we strive to immerse the audience in this process - not just the plot - to ask questions about human existence that resonate and then detonate within each individual.