Samuel Beckett’s Endgame does not show a typical family, but he does write about family dynamics in addition to the larger issue of how man copes with mortality as civilization crumbles. Currently revived Off-Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theater, Beckett’s 1957 one-act depicts a quartet of survivors of an unnamed apocalypse quarreling and coping through one day. Climate change, pandemics, and increasing nuclear tensions make the play more relevant than ever.
Blind, bossy Hamm is confined to a wheelchair, unable to stand or move. His servant Clov is unable to sit and constantly roams about, griping about Hamm’s demands. Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell, both apparently without legs, live in a pair of garbage cans. Doesn’t sound like much fun, but the play can be darkly comic. “There’s nothing as funny as unhappiness,” observes Nell as she converses on their untenable situation.
Ciaran O’Reilly’s staging captures the hopeless tragedy of Beckett’s dark vision but misses the heartbreaking comedy. Legendary stage clown Bill Irwin does give Clov a spectacularly comic physical life, pulling his legs around like a pair of heavy weights. He makes a simple task like climbing a ladder a portrait of Chaplin-esque whimsy. John Douglas Thompson endows Hamm with a shattered regality. He’s a broken-down king reduced to ruling a shadowy room. Unfortunately these two fine actors fail to establish the essential love-hate connection between their characters. Hamm and Clov are an end-of-the-world Laurel and Hardy, each setting the other off, despising the other, but they can’t separate because there is nowhere else to go. This conflict is the comedy, and it’s missing.
There are moments of bleak humor from Joe Grifasi’s Nagg who resembles and delivers his lines like a vaudeville comic and Patrice Johnson Chevannes’ Nell, who savors her brief moments out of the ashcan and celebrates the word “Yesterday” as a golden emblem of happier days.
Set designer Charlie Corcornan creates an appropriately shabby setting which along with Orla Long’s ruined costumes and Michael Gottlieb’s stark lighting provide the right environment for a sorrowful but not comic enough Endgame.
