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Stepping into 14 Henrietta Street, the audience of Company SJ’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Fizzles is met with the decaying signs of a century of tenement life — missing floorboards, cracked walls, entire ceilings stripped to reveal bare insulation. It’s fragmented and gloomy, and it’s the perfect setting for a whole lot of Beckett’s mostly fragmented and gloomy bibliography. Moving into the first room of the evening’s route, an explanatory note about the performance site reveals its distinguished Georgian history, housing at one time the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. This other side to the building’s story houses the writer just as well as its flaking wood does, as it links back to Beckett’s own privileged upbringing in Foxrock.

It is the atmosphere brought about by the location and a sparse few props that is Company SJ’s greatest strength in this piece. The actor, Raymond Keane, is met on-stage for the third segment by a floating greatcoat, one of the great Beckettian staples, an item the writer clothed most of his prose protagonists in at one stage of their existences. The actual performance, made up of movements by Keane and a recorded reading of assorted Fizzles – scraps of prose pieces Beckett wrote in the 1970s – at times comes secondary to the sense of place, and the mind wanders to the nail marks in the wall rather than the spoken words.

Indeed, it can often be hard to follow the Fizzles, and this may have something to do with their origin as prose pieces. Reading Beckett’s fiction is an exercise very separate to listening to it; his writing is structured so as one gets lost in it, so as to create the sense of confusion conveyed by the narrator, so as to force the reader to go back over text again and again. In listening, this simply results in missed lines. Luckily, as snippets of absurdism, missing lines in Fizzles won’t mean you’re missing any vital plot points, but it can be disappointing.

As a site-specific-performance, this one ticks all the right boxes, housed in a building that would be fascinating as the location of any event. As an adaptation of Fizzles, it lacks enough innovation to make its conversion to a theatre piece a thoroughly worthwhile one. Keane’s frail limps around the house are impressive in their controlled deficiency, but they never progress far past simple limps around the house. Video projections of the actor similarly limping around the Pigeon House Generating Station in Ringsend set up a dual character that cleverly mimics Beckett’s narrator’s split personalities, and also divide Keane’s performance into three: recorded narrator, suffering actor, and fading projection.

All comes to a climax in the finale of the piece with Fizzle 3, the fragment which most suits the set-up. “It’s impossible I should have a voice and I have none, he’ll find one for me, ill beseeming me, it will meet the need, his need, but no more of him.” Lines like these boom into the corner of a room Keane is backed into, mouth gaping and eyes watering until a glowing light is finally extinguished, and oblivion is cast.

Company SJ provide a fine way to indulge in some of the more obscure writings of Samuel Beckett in a brilliantly resonant location.

Samuel Beckett’s Fizzles runs at 14 Henrietta Street until September 17 as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival.

COMPANY SJ presents SAMUEL BECKETT’S FIZZLES; BECKETT IN THE CITY from Shoot To Kill on Vimeo.