Endgame review: Beckett's classic is still as bleak and brilliant as ever
Aaron Monaghan and Rory Nolan in Druid's production of Endgame. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★★☆
Samuel Beckett often spoke of Endgame as his masterpiece, high praise indeed from the author of Waiting for Godot and Happy Days. It is certainly a timeless piece of writing, and its world-weary humour seems altogether contemporary, though it was first produced in 1957.
At its centre is Hamm, whose treatment of his manservant Clov and his parents Nagg and Nell is seldom less than tyrannical. Even in a dystopian world reduced to a single household, it seems, some are destined to be masters and others their dogsbodies. Each has their own handicap; Hamm is blind and cannot stand; Clov cannot sit; and Nagg and Nell are each confined in a metal bin.
The play opens with Clov using a ladder to uncurtain the high windows before checking that Nagg and Nell are alive. He then removes the sheet covering Hamm, who is confined to an armchair on castors. After Clov leaves the room, Hamm removes a bloody cloth from his face, which inevitably recalls the Veil of Veronica. “Me – to play,” he says.
There follows 90 minutes of bitter wit and banter. As Nell observes: “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”
Beckett’s fastidious instructions do not leave much leeway in staging the play, but Francis O’Connor’s set design is typically inventive. The single room in which Endgame is set is round and closed in with a high ceiling - a shape that suggests a silo, but also replicates that of Nagg and Nell’s bins - while the two round windows, set far up on the back wall, replicate the shape of Hamm’s glasses.
Garry Hynes’ direction is as sure as one might expect from the Druid veteran, while the cast is superb. Rory Nolan’s Hamm is a bully with some lingering vestige of humanity; Aaron Monaghan’s Clov is obsequious but not without courage; while Bosco Hogan's Nagg and Marie Mullen's Nell are as endearing a couple as ever had the misfortune to grow old and helpless.
Endgame is as bleak as its title suggests, and one can only imagine how controversial it was for Hamm to describe God as “a bastard” when the play was first performed. Even today, it has the power to startle.
- Endgame runs at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway as part of Galway International Arts Festival until July 28
