Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation

Abstract

All That Fall is not a story about an old woman on her way to and from a railway station in outer Dublin to meet her husband coming home from work. In this play the anguish of an ordinary human being, and the resounding disappointment which her words express, is replaced by something far wider and more general in its address to the human psyche. The pain of somebody whose ordinariness Beckett is constantly stressing, reflects a non-localised, non-personal sphere in which anyone can revive their own reflection. We are not looking at an individual anguished outcast here, although the ordinary plot-structure — and the critical acclaim for the play as one of Beckett’s most accessible — would have us believe we are. We are looking at ourselves; this is truly a modern-day Everyman.

I do not exist. The fact is well known.

Maddy Rooney