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.

Waiting for Godot

by Samuel Beckett

seen at the Barbican on 10 June 2015

This production from the Sydney Theatre Company forms part of the Barbican's Inernational Beckett season. It is directed by Andrew Upton and features Hugo Weaving as Vladimir, Richard Roxburgh as Estragon, Philip Quast as Pozzo and Luke Mullins as Lucky, with Keir Edkins-O'Brien as the boy (in this performance).

The set contained the requisite tree and a mound to perch on, but also a few stumps (or truncated poles). A stage proscenium appeared to be set at an angle across the acting space, though it was not entirely clear which way it was facing. There were light bulbs all around it but these could have been stage lights (to be concealed from an audience on the other side) or part of a lighting effect to be used as a framing device (and hence visible to the audience) - in the event they were not used.

Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh made a brilliant duo as the tramps Vladimir and Estragon - by turns exasperated and touchingly reliant on each other, bored, frustrated, animated, confused, determined. Philip Quast and Luke Mullins provided the extraordinary and very disquieting distraction of Pozzo and Lucky - apparently a clear case of master-slave exploitation in the first act, unaccountably transmuted to a more ambivalent mutual dependency in the second.

The action is so stripped down, the situation so enigmatic, the prospect so bleak, yet the actors summoned the highest degree of attention from the audience to provide an exploration of humanity which in its final moments was deeply moving - a superb production of a difficult play.