Endgame
Town Hall Theatre, Galway
★★★★☆
So familiar are the rituals in Samuel Beckett’s indestructible 1957 tragicomedy that, like the ceremonies of religion, it hardly seems possible that somebody had to invent them.
They are present again in Druid’s exquisite production for Galway International Arts Festival. Bitter, blind Hamm (Rory Nolan) gripes in his seedy chair. The positively ancient Nell and Nagg (Marie Mullen and Bosco Hogan), his parents, emerge from dustbins to marvel that they could ever have been young. The relatively sprightly Clov (Aaron Monaghan) scuttles between them like a harried nurse in a care home for the terminally despairing. (Monaghan’s morning-suited version here occasionally suggests Manuel in an even grimmer Fawlty Towers.)
It has often been argued that the set could be the interior of a skull. These personified elements of the psyche squabble beneath two eye windows that, from what Clov tells us, look out on a blasted wasteland. Garry Hynes, Druid’s cofounder, who directed a terrific Waiting for Godot for the company in 2016, appears to be gesturing towards martial annihilation.
Francis O’Connor’s design has the look of a military pillbox – concrete interiors draped by intruding smoke. More than a few fantasies of post-nuclear apocalypse have smelled like this.
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The play remains, however, as unfettered as ever. Endgame is everywhere and nowhere. One is again reminded that, even before Beckett became a legend, he was already making jokes at the expense of his own addiction to creative misery. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell says, economically summarising the great man’s entire career.
Though the usual mortal terrors hang over this production, it distinguishes itself from previous incarnations by the lightness of its step.
[ ‘To understand Endgame is to understand that you can’t understand Endgame’Opens in new window ]
Hogan and Mullen, the cast’s distinguished eminences, make prickly children of the wretched, ill-treated waste matter. Nolan, wrapped in a ragged robe that looks to have been costly when new, is unusually ageless for Hamm; that sense of a not-yet-decrepit man aping old age adds to his pomposity. Monaghan moves with a waddle that owes much to the comedy of silent cinema. All speak with admirable clarity that allows the bleak wit to crackle anew. If, that is, something bleak can crackle.
Endgame is at Town Hall Theatre, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until Sunday, July 28th
