Trevor Nunn seems to believe that his is the first stage presentation of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play. In fact, it was staged within a decade of its BBC radio première, and on several occasions since. I remember seeing – or rather, not seeing – a production in pitch darkness at BAC in the mid-1990s, and barely a month ago this page carried a report from the Happy Days festival of Beckettiana in Enniskillen which included Irish company Pan Pan’s version. Beckett and his notoriously protective estate seem to have consistently objected to its being put onstage, but not always to have actually refused.
    
If Nunn had done more research (or perhaps simply been more scrupulous in the words he uses in this production’s programme), he would know that most stage presentations of the piece are nevertheless not dramatisations of it but offered in styles which acknowledge its radio origins, for instance with sound effects “Foleyed” live onstage of Mrs Rooney’s journey along an Irish country road to a railway station to meet her husband, then of the pair’s walk back. Nunn’s 75-minute production uses recorded sound effects, but his cast of nine give a kind of semi-staged performance, scripts in hand, on a bare stage hung with old-fashioned radio microphones and a red “studio live” light. Alas, this ends up looking less like an allusion to the piece’s original form than like indecision over how far to go one way or t’other.
    
As the elderly Maddy Rooney, Eileen Atkins is excellent. She gives full sombre weight to what often seem, to a 21st-century audience, to be instances of Beckett parodying his own reputation for morbidity, as when a driver offers Maddy a lift by asking, “Are you going in my direction?”; she replies, like a Hibernian Eeyore, “I am. We all are.” As husband Dan, however, Michael Gambon seems surprisingly semi-detached; I had the impression that he was not carrying his script merely for show, and he also left me uncertain whether or not his version of Dan is blind, or merely generally unwell like his wife. The little 70-seat Jermyn Street Theatre has scored a major coup in obtaining permission for such a production, and in the starry names involved; the entire run has long since sold out. However, on this showing it is not essential viewing, and on historical evidence it’s not the milestone it claims.
     
Written for the Financial Times.