If you are someone who enjoys comedy, this is not the play for you. Endgame is bleak. And I mean quasi-apocalyptic, legless humans living in bins sort of bleak. Originally written in French as Fin de Partie, the play’s name refers to the dying moments of a chess game when only a few lone pieces remain standing.
Centred on leaving and the characters’ painful inability to do so, silence litters the dialogue like rests falling on a musical score. Director Samantha Losey adeptly highlights this, emphasising the nothingness between lines: words, shouts, wails and sobs echo into silence. The effect is simultaneously profound, tender and disturbing.
The focus in Endgame inevitably falls on the four actors; aside from a smidgeon of overacting in parts, and the redundant use of silly accents (Sam Bright’s unfortunately camp choice of twang for the character of Clov was bizarrely reminiscent of Frank Spencer) the actors pull it off with style and heaps of dark humour.
Will Spray, in the role of blind wheelchair-bound Hamm, dominates the stage. With his bedraggled hair and weary, bloodshot eyes (maybe due more to his 21st Birthday the night before than to absolute synthesis with the character) he is genuinely terrifying in parts, whilst also ably managing moments of warmth and tenderness. Exchanges between Nell (Rowan Parkes) and Nagg (Benjamin Coopman) are a treat – paradoxically hopeless yet full of vitality, they ooze black, uncomfortable humour.
The stage design (a giant chess-board) will elaborate upon Beckett’s chess metaphor; characters figuratively become pieces, unable to move. Though inventive, my small concern is that some of the existential hopelessness of a life that is, after all, meaningless may be lost with the prevailing inter-scene suggestion of an omnipotent presence.
Yet in a play where the overriding sense is that of desire to leave, I found myself truly gripped, moved, and invariably wanting to stay.
Three stars
