Theatre Review: Endgame
Source: Old Vic
Angus Colwell reviews Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Old Vic, starring Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe.
If this is to be the Old Vic’s last production before a virus prevents us from congregating in groups of more than one, it is a suitably claustrophobic note on which to end.
Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a one-act play, set in one room, the only realm that seems to exist - a quarantine, if you will. It is not the case that nothing is outside; outside is nothing. Beckett, revelling in the paranoia of the unspecified and the unknown, gives at least enough information for us to posit that this is a post-apocalyptic world (“What time is it?” “Zero”). Beckett’s experimentation with our neuroses still haunts us decades on in multifarious ways. Written in 1957, “there’s no more nature” seems to now warn of our ecological sleepwalking, in comparison to Dr Strangelove’s post-war worry about the bomb.
Endgame is not a production that cries out for pyrotechnics or elaborate stage wizardry. Samuel Beckett’s immortal claim following JoAnne Akalaitis’s 1984 staging of the play haunts any modern performance of it: “Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me.” Richard Jones’s latest version at the Old Vic stays true to Beckett’s wishes, but departs from the expected drudgery of existential gloom that the play alludes to.
Clov (Daniel Radcliffe) lives a brutal life of performing menial tasks for the immobile and blind Hamm (Alan Cumming). Occasionally, Hamm’s parents Nagg (Karl Johnson) and Nell (Jane Horrocks) pop their heads out of the dustbins in which they live to pine for sugar and indulge in nostalgia.
It is a play, therefore, in which three out of the four characters do not move. Daniel Radcliffe more than makes up for the deficit. His physical performance is remarkable, maintaining a truly unique variety of limp for the whole play, with every muscle in his body withering to cultivate a farcical deference and feebleness. If Radcliffe wants to distance his career from a wizard-shaped spectre, his recent, triumphantly successful forays into Beckett and Stoppard should definitely help.
Aside from Radcliffe’s performance however, the tone of the production is muddled. In attempting to make difficult theatre (for want of a better word) “accessible”, Jones’ Endgame is a slapstick without the dark contrast which renders the comedy absurd.
Beckett’s works are undoubtedly inflected with humour. But humour is used to sharpen the dull gloom into focus. The genius of Beckett’s works is in the revelation that the subject matter is more bleak in comparison with humour, than as a portrait of despair in and of itself.
The bin-bound Nagg and Nell tap into this bleak farce best. Karl Johnson and Jane Horrocks seep desperation from their pores, with Horrocks looking particularly, horrifyingly corpse-like. When the play tentatively explores love, Nagg and Nell are physically unable to reach out to each other from their bins and kiss. “Why this farce, day after day?” Nell asks, before they return to dreams of biscuits and having working teeth.
Alan Cumming’s playful interpretation of Hamm is entertaining, and departs from a monotonous idea of the character. If Nagg and Nell are restricted by external physical objects, Hamm is repressed by his own body. Immobile and blind, he further emerges as a superstitious hypochondriac. His performance interestingly hints to a sexual repression — this Hamm is frequently frivolous, and even camp. Cumming fantastically milks the line “I’m feeling queer”, and his pining towards Clov that “you don’t love me…you loved me once” suggest unsatisfied libido.
But a departure from monotony fails to make up for a lack of dread in his performance. The apocalyptic horror present in Beckett’s text is shown not through fear and frenzy, but through pining and whinging.
The effect of Cummings’ performance was also undermined by the Beckett short Rough for Theatre II played before Endgame, in which he steals the show with a magisterial and playful performance of a queer, neurotic inspector. His brilliant performance in the short meant that the audience was accustomed to his comedic timing in a different characterisation, whereas Radcliffe’s subdued (and somewhat non-spectacular) performance in Rough for Theatre II meant that his performance in the opening minutes of Endgame was all the more astonishing.
Cummings’ comedic timing, Radcliffe’s physical endurance, Johnson’s wheezing resignation and Horrocks’ sickly decrepitude are all magnificent individual spectacles, but they are so separate as to not complete a coherent visualisation of Endgame’s emptiness. Beckett once said that laughter was “the awareness that there is nothing to be done”. This production was less of an affirmative force, and resembled a family sitcom more than a post-apocalyptic absurdity.