Electronic Telegraph

Monday April 29, 1996

"Endgame"

review by Charles Spencer

I don't think Beckett's grim fable could be better staged or performed than it is here. Katie Mitchell's meticulous production is alert to every nuance in the script, and there are outstanding performances from Alun Armstrong as the wheelchair-bound bully Hamm and Stephen Dillane as the abused but not entirely subservient Clov. But Beckett is surely the most overrated of dramatists, and I would be grateful if I never had to sit through one of his glibly reductive, depressing and mind-bendingly tedious plays ever again. I'll almost certainly have to in the line of duty, but there is no reason for you to put yourself through so penitential and unrewarding an experience. Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0171-369 1732).

Endgame

1996

The London Theatre Guide - Online

Monday April 29, 1996

"Endgame"

review by Alan Bird

A dull evening caused by a dull play. Beckett is not the easiest of playwrights to understand, and Endgame is an example of his obscure style.

The play is about four people who survive a nuclear holocaust, they live in a dingy house, living off dried biscuits and little else. The drama is based on the relationship between Hamm, who is master of the house, his parents Nagg and Nell and finally Hamm's servant, Clov.

The play reflects Beckett's philosophical view that life is meaningless and that the only sane person is one who is a total pessimist. You can tell Beckett lived in France throughout the fifties and was greatly influenced by the existentialist school of thought popularised by Sartre.

Two lines from the play reflect the message which Beckett was attempting to convey. "Good as nothing. Is that possible?" and "If he's weeping, he must be alive." It is that sombre, depressive view which dominates. The script may provide an interesting philosophical read, but as a play it is tedious and does not in my opinion deserve to be on a West End stage.

If you enjoy existentialist literature such as 'Nausea' by John Paul Sartre, then this is a play to be seen. It is well acted with a marvellous performance by Stephen Dillane as Clov. However, if you think Beckett is just morbid, dull and meaningless then this play will certainly confirm your opinion.

The Times  (London)

April 19, 1996

All's well that end's ill

'Endgame'

If you had looked behind the pocked and pitted scarp that was the late Samuel Beckett's face, you might have found something like the room Rae Smith has designed for his Endgame: black walls, one yellowy window, one whitish window, thin grey light that darkens as the day unrolls, and two streaked dustbins that turn out to contain the antique parents of blind Hamm, who sits in a shabby armchair, presiding over the murk like a derelict Pluto over a rundown section of Hades. "I shall always be depressed," Beckett once said; and to see Katie Mitchell's grimly humorous revival is to believe him.

What does Endgame mean? If you are tempted to give a confident answer, you should note a typically sardonic exchange between Alun Armstrong's Hamm and his slave Clov, here a painfully loping hunchback played by Stephen Dillane. "We're not beginning to mean something?" "Mean something, you and I? Ah, that's a good one." Significance for Beckett's characters tends to be their own insignificance; meaning is a lack of meaning that, if they do not wish to add to their existing torments, they would do well to accept.

Still, Beckett did tell the Hamm in a German revival of Endgame he himself directed that he was "a king in a chess game lost from the start. Now at the end he makes a few loud, senseless moves as only a bad player would. A good one would have given up long ago. He is only trying to delay the inevitable end." In other words, he cannot see that death and oblivion are better options than struggle and pain. As Beckett also said, Hamm's folly is that he persists in "saying 'no' to nothingness".

Cheerful stuff, eh? The play is certainly harsher than Waiting for Godot, whose characters display a certain resilience as they mooch about counting their unhatched chickens. Yet isn't there a certain exhilaration in the company of a dramatist not only unafraid of looking into the void but actually ready to welcome it? Certainly, I found a possibly masochistic pleasure in watching Armstrong's king, isolated on the chessboard of life, blunder his way towards recognising that surrender is his only dignified recourse.

Armstrong comes with a white-greenish face, stubble on the chin, a vile black overcoat, and a grinding northern accent. The impression he gives is of some tyrannical, grasping old mill- owner who has lost everything to the bailiffs except a few pathetic oddments: a dirty handkerchief, the long pole with which he ineptly tries to punt his chair, the ludicrous stuffed toy he pretends is his adoring pet dog. He rasps, sneers and snaps as his mood swings from anger to self-pity to a scorn that embraces his family, the world, a God who cannot be bothered so much as to exist, and himself.

Dillane, limping about in a caretaker's brown coat, makes a rather muted, reticent Clov, although his outbursts of indignation are the more forceful for being few. There are also striking performances from inside the parental dustbins. Eileen Nicholas's Nell mostly goes in for stricken bewilderment; Harry Jones's Nagg, armed with a long red nose that juts over his home's rim, comes across as a jauntily decrepit blend of Rumpelstiltskin and Mr Punch.