Endgame

by Samuel Beckett

seen at the Old Vic on 18 February 2020

Richard Jones directs Alan Cummings as Hamm, a wheelchair-bound blind man, Daniel Radcliffe as Clov, his servant who cannot sit down, Karl Johnson as Nagg, his father, and Jane Horrocks as Nell, his mother, the two parents being confined in dustbins, in Beckett's dystopian vision of the human condition near its wits' end.

The first time I saw this play I was 12 or 13, and it was a play reading at a nearby girls' school. The second time, I was 18 and it was produced at my own school. I think it's fair to say that neither production really managed to get beyond the sheer bleakness of the situation to the manic humour running through it. I saw a production at Trinity College, Dublin many years later, and it was a revelation. The most surprising thing was the lyricism of much of the language, which for me was unlocked by the Irish lilt of the actors in Dublin. This was possibly the most important factor missing from the attempts of Australian schoolchildren to grapple with the text.

At the Old Vic the speaking voices are not Irish; Alan Cummings employs a refined accent often exaggerated for campily comic (or melodramatic) effect, while Daniel Radlciffe uses a more demotic register, well-spoken but with occasionally flattened vowels and glottal "t's". Hamm's immobility in a throne-like wheelchair, exposing shockingly shanks that can only be false, forces us to concentrate on his rambling speeches and pathetic demands for attention. Clov, in contrast, blunders round the stage in a headlong but distorted gait, apparently able to hold only one thing at a time in his mind, leading to much comic business managing both a ladder and a spyglass. It's one of Beckett's ost intriguing double-acts, the mixture of dependence and resentment perfectly expressed in long-rehearsed interchanges and recriminations. Hamm's parents, rising sepulchrally from their dustbins, provide some relief from the claustrophobic central pair.

This is a fine production, with Cummings's waspish and theatrical Hamm beautifully off-set by Radliffe's more stolid Clov. Once again Daniel Radcliffe shows his great theatrical skill with a difficult physical part (as the titular Cripple of Inishmaan a few years ago he also showed what he could do in this respect) as well as investing his character with deep feeling that can barely be expressed in his occasional bursts of rage. 

The play is coupled with a short curtain-raiser, also by Beckett, called Rough for Theatre II in which Cummings and Radcliffe examine 'the files' on a nameless character silhouetted in a window behind them, attempting apparently to reach some conclusion about the figure's moral condition. It's often wordy, intermingled with non-sequiturs of stage business (desklights behaving erratically, and so forth) - a typical Beckettian exercise in building a view of a person by adducing 'evidence' rather than using more conventional dramatic means. Very elegantly done, and allowing the two actors to sine in a very different way from the main play.