ENDGAME. To 23 April.
London
ENDGAME
by Samuel Beckett
Barbican Theatre To 23 April 2006
Sat Fri 7.45pm, Sat 4pm & 7.45pm, Sun 4pm
Runs 1hr 50min No interval
TICKETS: 0845 120 7554
www.barbican.org.uk (reduced booking fee online)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 April
Potential for a fine production not realised.
The Barbican’s Beckett-bash (just the return of John Hurt in Krapp‘s Last Tape to come, and go) has shown that this poet of alleged nothingness is fully aware of everyday life. Even without Happy Days and Winnie’s handbag stuffed with the paraphernalia of the ephemeral, there’s been Godot with its protagonists’ knowledge of music-hall and circus and Pozzo’s detailed awareness of pipes and watches, let alone Play with its torrid passions in the background.
All such things are referred to from the viewpoint of desolation, but there is tremendous optimism for audiences. Beckett’s vision discards life’s inessentials. Play’s threesome might be roughcast of face and bodily undergoing urn-burial, but their real-life counterparts would be having a miserable time of it too on, rather than in, earth. When everything else has been stripped away, Beckett shows there’s the precise, elegant language and devastating, bleak beauty of his stage pictures still to live, if not die, for.
But Endgame (reputedly Beckett’s favourite dramatic child) tests the most optimistic patience. No grand passions, just tetchy relationships, old age reduced to scrapping for pap in the next generation’s dustbins, useless power, and energy kept in servitude to routine. Life’s a grim game (“Me to play,” are Hamm’s opening words), everything ultimately discarded apart from a bloodsoaked handkerchief to place over the eyes. And Clove, wanting but unable to leave, without even the Godot tramps’ comradeship.
It needs careful articulation. Instead, director Charles Sturridge applies external tricks. The set is isolated in the centre of the expansive Barbican stage, creating an intrusive theatricality. Hamm’s armchair is oversized, as if purpose-built. And in place of high windows overlooking desolate land and sea, the outlooks are at common height.
This means Clov, who has to climb a stepladder to them, needs to be short in stature. It gives Peter Dinklage’s character an apposite trudging huffiness, but he often reduces Clov’s words to a generalised sense of agony shown up by Kenneth Cranham’s Hamm, beautifully differentiating new from expected agonies, by Tom Hickey’s Nagg and Georgina Hale’s eloquently elegiac Nell. These are performances from a better production.
Hamm: Kenneth Cranham
Clov: Peter Dinklage
Nagg: Tom Hickey
Nell: Georgina Hale
Director: Charles Sturridge
Designer: Eileen Diss
Lighting: Davy Cunningham
Costume: Charlotte Walter
2006-04-22 10:56:48