ALL THAT FALL

The play follows Maddy Rooney, an ancient woman "destroyed with sorrow and pining and gentility and church-going and fat and rheumatism and childlessness," on a perilous journey to the train station to meet her blind husband on his birthday (he "may be a hundred") and accompany him home through the wind and the rain. On the way she encounters a succession of vivid characters (All That Fall has the largest cast of any of Beckett's plays), most based on people Beckett knew in his youth. The play is a riotous, existential romp that is so rich with innuendo it has been called "a tour-de-force in audial pornography."