Endgame

Synopsis

Set in a bare, partially underground room, Beckett's 1957 existentialist play finds a wheel-chair bound Hamm passing the time by ordering his servant Clov to move him around, fetch objects and peer out the window for signs of life, while his bin-dwelling parents Nagg and Nell look on.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 16 October 2009

A recent director of the play described Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as “Laurel and Hardy in hell”, but the new Complicite production by Simon McBurney is neither very funny nor very hellish.

It is grim and grimy all right, with Mark Rylance’s blind, immobile Hamm gesticulating in the void, McBurney himself stomping stiff-leggedly around as the resentful Clov and Hamm’s legless parents, Nagg and Nell – beautifully articulated by Tom Hickey and Miriam Margolyes – emerging, when allowed, from beneath their downstage dustbin lids.

But this greatest of all Beckett’s plays, a sort of King Lear without the weather or the sub-plots, fails to strike out in any truly tragic dimension. While it is certainly a charade of tears, blindness and death, it should also be a post-apocalyptic chamber of horrors, a musical nightmare.

The last West End production five years ago, with Michael Gambon and Lee Evans, was more successful in conveying the ironic gr...

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Latest User Review

larna - 18 December 2009:

I thought this play was absolutely dreadful. The only bit that i remember was the bit when he came on at the beginning and was on the ladder. Then from then on i just fell asleep. DONT GO TO SEE IT. Worst show ever created. Absolute WASTE of money. ...

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