The estate that manages the works of Irish writer Samuel Beckett is notoriously strict, which explains why Beckett’s play All That Fall, a work of genius, has remained virtually unknown until recently.

Beckett conceived All That Fall as a radio play and he never wanted to see it on-stage. Shortly after the script premiered on BBC radio in 1957, Beckett wrote, “Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings…will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.” Beckett turned down both Laurence Olivier and Ingmar Bergman when they separately requested permission to produce it theatrically.

Until two years ago, the Beckett estate was as intransigent as the playwright had been. Then, in 2012, director Trevor Nunn convinced the estate that it should allow him to mount All That Fall on-stage in London, while honouring its roots by presenting the script as if it were being read by actors in a radio studio. The resulting production, which starred Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, was an enormous critical success that transferred to Broadway.

Now Blackbird Theatre is bringing All That Fall to Vancouver for the first time, under Duncan Fraser’s direction. Asked if the estate still insists on the radio-studio conceit, Fraser replies in his Scottish brogue: “Oh, yes. They sent us a letter. A loooong letter. A very strictly worded, finger-wagging letter we got. Yes.”

But no one need worry; Fraser relishes the sound of the script. Talking to the Straight in his home, a capacious former farmhouse near 41st and Knight, Fraser explains that he wanted to present the whole play in the dark—until John Wright, Blackbird’s artistic director, nixed the idea. “I wanted it to be a purely aural experience,” Fraser states. “Much of what’s done and not done on-stage [in the production] is with that in mind. I want people to listen to the loudspeakers rather than watch the actors. If I had my druthers, I’d give ’em all blindfolds.”

And Fraser is clearly smitten with both the depth and humour of All That Fall. “I want people to know that it’s Beckett as they’ve never seen him before,” he declares. “It’s Beckett at his most playful and jocular—and it’s a whodunit.”

In the play, Mrs. Rooney—old, fat, and ailing—walks to the train station to meet her blind husband, who’s coming back from work. Along the way, she encounters a man on a cart, then a man on a bicycle. Finally, she accepts a ride from a man in a car. When Mrs. Rooney gets to the station, the train is unaccountably late. When it arrives, it comes carrying a gruesome mystery.

Like many of Beckett’s characters, including the tramps in Waiting for Godot, Mrs. Rooney is burdened by existential angst. “How can I go on, I cannot,” she says shortly after we meet her. But Beckett quickly cast her despair as absurd: “Oh let me just flop down flat on the road like a big fat jelly out of a bowl and never move again! A great big slop thick with grit and dust and flies, they would have to scoop me up with a shovel.”

Fraser reveals that when he first read the script, “I was expecting the usual, as one does—the usual being rather abstract and obscure. But this is comical, for the most part. It’s got its dark and macabre moments, but, relatively speaking, it’s a bit of a romp.”

In his staging, which is minimal, Fraser embraces that playfulness. When Mr. Slocum, the owner of the car, is about to extricate Mrs. Rooney, who is rigid with rheumatism, from the front seat, Mrs. Rooney gets impatient and Mr. Slocum’s response is ripe: “I’m coming, Mrs. Rooney, I’m coming, give me time, I’m as stiff as yourself.”

Mostly, Fraser just lines his actors up, scripts in hand, and lets them read. But the director has allowed them to physicalize this passage. “They wrestle with one another a fair bit in front of the microphone,” he says. “It’s interesting to look at, I suppose, but the main thing is that the actors find it easier to make the necessary grunts and groans if you put them together. If someone’s pushing you up the bum, you know when to make the appropriate noise.”

As much as he enjoys the humour, Fraser is far from oblivious to the script’s dense meanings. The cart is being pulled by a hinny, the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse. Fraser refers to an exchange that’s about Christ entering Jerusalem on a hinny, which is a sterile animal, and he points out that the cart driver’s name is Christy. “Of course, Christy is pulling a cartload of manure,” he goes on, “and that’s a metaphor for the Christian faith and the Bible, which was a ball of shit, as far as Beckett was concerned.”

There’s plenty more: “We go from the cart to the bicycle, to the passing van that knocks Mr. Tyler off his bicycle, to the limousine, which kills a hen, to the trains, which are monstrous. I think Beckett is intent on telling us that the world’s gone to rat shit: we’re progressively at the mercy of these machines, and we may well have been better off without them.”

But Fraser is presenting All That Fall in the simplest and most radiolike way. The actors will make all of the sounds of the natural world—doves, dogs, wasps—and the mechanical sounds will be made by recordings. Fraser has cast his actors—Lee Van Paassen, William Samples, Gerard Plunkett, Leanna Brodie, and Adam Henderson—for their vocal abilities. And he’s hired Chris Cutress, an audio designer and sound engineer, who used to work at CBC Radio.

Fraser wants audience members to make their own meanings from the experience. He remembers: “I said to my actors when we first approached this, the very first day of rehearsal, ‘You know, there’s an awful lot of profundities in this play, references to classical theatre and God knows what in the Bible, blah de blah; almost everybody she meets is a metaphor for something. But we can’t bother ourselves. What I want you to imagine you’re doing here is you’re taking out tourists in a glass-bottomed boat. Let them, if they wish, peer down at the depths of the oceans beneath. Our job is to sail the damn thing and not let it sink.”

Blackbird Theatre and the Cultch present All That Fall at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre from Monday (December 29) to January 24.