By Samuel Beckett. Directed by Duncan Fraser. A Blackbird Theatre production at the Cultch Historic Theatre on Monday, December 29. Continues until January 24

All That Fall might contain the funniest existential despair you’ll ever experience.

In general, playwright Samuel Beckett is far more amusing than most people give him credit for—Waiting for Godot, which some regard as impenetrable, contains hilarious vaudevillian riffs—but All That Fall is the most thoroughly comic Beckett I’ve seen.

In it, fat, rheumatic Mrs. Rooney walks to the train station to meet her husband, who’s coming home from work. Along the way, she encounters increasingly threatening modes of transportation: a cart, a bicycle, a car, and, finally, a train. The train is late and, when it arrives, it bears a grim revelation.

Beckett was big on stripping language to its essentials and the result, in Godot and other scripts, is a kind of pared-down, universal speech. In All That Fall, however, the characters are eccentrically Irish, and their florid rhythms give comic exaggeration to their despair. Walking with Mr. Tyler, the cyclist, Mrs. Rooney says, “Let us halt a moment and let this vile dust fall back upon the viler worms.” And, when Mr. Slocum is trying, unsuccessfully, to start his car, Mrs. Rooney asks him what he’s doing, and he replies: “Gazing straight before me, Mrs. Rooney, through the windscreen, into the void.”

Beneath this absurdity there is, of course, agony that’s born of mortality and meaninglessness. God is a bitter joke and death saturates the landscape. When Mr. Rooney asks his wife what the day is doing, she replies: “Shrouding, shrouding, the best of it is past.”

All That Fall was written for the radio and the Beckett estate will only allow it to be presented theatrically as a staged radio play. Within this constraint, director Duncan Fraser’s production is strongest at its simplest. The actors line up at microphones and read their scripts; we don’t see cars or bicycles, and Chris Cutress and Scott Zechner’s sound design uses both recorded noises and foley effects.

Leanna Brodie’s characterizations of a smug Christian woman named Miss Fitt and a little boy called Jerry are particularly clear and unforced. In the preview performance I attended, I also enjoyed Lee Van Paassen (Mrs. Rooney) and William Samples (Mr. Rooney and the cart-driver, Christie), as well as Adam Henderson and Gerard Plunkett, who are also multiply cast.

Fraser gilds the lily, however. He has added an obvious and unnecessary device in which an announcer’s voice frames the play, introducing it as a radio program, and giving credits at the end. And, when a stage direction calls only for the cooing of doves, this production includes the wailing of a baby, clumsily underlining Mrs. Rooney’s childlessness. In Marti Wright’s set design, a giant, projected image of Beckett hovers over the proceedings.

Beckett knew what he was doing; these embellishments gum up the works.

Still, there’s a masterpiece here. I highly recommend it.