THEATRE: Andrew Wilson
IN Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, currently on at the Market Theatre, the main character cries “Use your head! You’re on earth! There’s no cure for that!” No cure for language either, because as relentlessly as Beckett sought to strip life down to its most minimal, sub-atomic essence, he challenged the rigid parameters and structures of language and its inherent fascism in determining the form and content of people’s expression of themselves and the universe.
Beckett’s constant love-hate relationship with life and language results in jarring, rhythmically beautiful literature couched in an existential horror that had many post-war critics and audiences aghast and confused.
Originally fin de partie, Endgame would have remained French if Beckett hadn’t been contractually bound to deliver an English version to the Royal Court Theatre in the late Fifties. Tied to deadlines and increasingly frustrated with each new draft, he despised his English version: “It’s lost all its sharpness; the rhythm has gone.” (1957).
Lara Foot-Newton’s sharply styled production shows little evidence of this. Vocal rhythm and Beckett’s superbly compressed poetic dialogue combine with mime and physical deformity to sketch a picture of humanity as hilarious as it is tragic.
Endgame recalls life as a relentless stalemate in a chess game, where the exasperation of endless waiting for an inevitable conclusion places its characters in a Felliniesque nightmare, and where the horror of laughter is neutralised by the joy of misery in a claustrophobic cycle of repetition.
Humanity in its various bits and pieces is represented by the blind, seated, paralysed Hamm and his manservant Clov, who is doomed to a life of standing. Outside,in two dustbins, live amputees Nell and Nagg, victims of a horror tandem bicycle accident years before. Or yesterday. Time is the ocean around them. Together the characters clash, bond and drift aimlessly like lost molecules in a failed experiment.
Endgame owes as much to Beckett’s personal experience as it does to his philosophies. The bleak claustrophobia and unavoidable humour of the play’s action, and the master-slave relationship between the two main characters, recall Beckett’s own hospital-room hell while awaiting the protracted death of a relative.
In the search for meaning, Beckett’s works are as uncompromising as they are humorous, cross-pollinating laughter and horror in a way that exposes humanity’s loss of humanity in a world where communication and existence are simultaneously revealing and meaningless.
Apart from its excellent direction and design, the Market Theatre production is characterised by a technically outstanding cast who rise to the physical and vocal demands of the text with discipline and experience, where the very specific cadences and rhythms in the action require a particular pace and timing in order to reveal the play’s humour and tragedy equally.
Initially Beckett clashed with George Devine’s direction of the first English production, demanding that Devine replace the humour he’s removed from the main characters. The chances are good that Beckett would have had little problem with this production.
Endgame is on at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg until March 22