Devilish Whimsy’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame captures Beckett’s seamless blending of comedy, providing us with a hopeless vision of the future while simultaneously evoking gallows humour, inviting us to laugh at our powerlessness to escape this apocalyptic fate. Against the tragic contemporary backdrop of escalating global and political crises, this production’s use of laughter in the bleakest situations feels as relevant today as it must have done to the original 1957 audiences.
Beckett’s play, set in an apocalyptic landscape, depicts the unsettling relationships between whom we assume to be the only four survivors: Ham, who is blind and unable to stand; his servant Clov, who is unable to sit; and his senile parents who spend the entire play sitting in bins. The play’s small cast skilfully handles the demands of capturing the complexities of these relationships. Rowan Brown and Guan Xiong Lam deserve particular recognition. From the confines of their newspaper-covered dustbins, they manage to alternate with great energy between weary bitterness and nostalgic tenderness towards one another.
The relationship between Nate Wintraub’s Hamm and Lyndsey Mugford’s Clov, around which the majority of the play’s action revolves, is also impressively executed. Wintraub, in a brocade jacket and velvet smoking hat, portrays Hamm as if he were a rake from an Edwardian melodrama thrust into modernity. Unable to function in this unfamiliar setting, his impish charm sours into infantile petulance. In contrast to this mercurial theatricality, Mugford brings an emotional numbness to the role of Clov. While Hamm has responded to the unknown catastrophe by collapsing into self-pity, Clov uses emotional repression as a coping mechanism. Despite their characters’ constant bickering, Wintraub and Mugford manage to create a briefly tender and poignant moment of solidarity; the stand-out scene of the play was when Mugford’s Clov, after refusing to touch Hamm, placed a caring hand on his shoulder while apologising for throwing a stuffed dog at him. Through the absurdity of the moment, we as audience members were given a brief vision of a more optimistic future of love and affection before Clov’s return to numbness.
Director Killian King successfully emphasised the environmental themes of the play; at the back of the set, two windows are covered in white paper to capture the barrenness of the outside world and the contemporary threat of rising sea levels is alluded to at one point with the sound of waves. Hamm’s line ‘nature is dead’ reminds us that the play’s dystopian setting may not be as far into the future as we would like to think.
The characters all bring humour to their roles, whether in the physical comedy of Clov dragging Hamm around the stage in an enormous armchair or in the darkly comedic jibes the characters direct towards one another (and at one point the audience). However, ultimately this production is a deft rendition of Beckett’s absurdist cry of despair for the future.
