Samuel Beckett | Endgame
Endgame, mime, physical theatre
Endgame, dir. Conor McPherson (2000).
Endgame, mime, physical theatre
In Endgame speechless, physical action is as significant as – and perhaps more significant
than – dialogue.
Beckett’s is very much physical theatre. It draws on a variety of popular modes and genres:
•
Mime acts
•
Commedia del’arte
•
Vaudeville
•
Musical hall entertainment
•
Cabaret
•
The circus
•
Silent film
Endgame, mime, physical theatre
In Endgame speechless, physical action is as significant as – and perhaps more significant
than – dialogue.
Beckett’s is very much physical theatre. It draws on a variety of popular modes and genres:
•
Mime acts
•
Commedia del’arte
•
Vaudeville
•
Musical hall entertainment
•
Cabaret
•
The circus
•
Silent film
Beckett’s only film – the silent Film (1965) features
Buster Keaton in the lead role. Keaton was Beckett’s
second choice part, after Charlie Chaplin.
Endgame, mime, physical theatre
Act without Words (1957)
For its first British performance – at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957 – Endgame was
accompanied by the Beckett’s mime piece, Act without Words.
The play features a lone man in a desert. Each time he tries to escape, following the sound of a
whistle, he is thrown back into the centre of the stage. He encounters and attempts interaction
with various objects which seem to have minds of their own. Finally, in frustration, he sits and
doesn’t move.
Endgame, mime, physical theatre
Comedy and Farce
HAMM: I feel a little too far to the left. [Clov moves chair slightly.] Now I feel a little
too far to the right. (Clov moves chair slightly.) I feel a little too far forward.
(Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far back. (Clov moves chair
slightly.) Don't stay there [i.e. behind the chair], you give me the shivers. [Clov
returns to his place beside the chair.] (24)
The influence of silent film comedy and musical hall farce here is clear:
•
The situation is ridiculous …
•
… and formulaic or repetitive.
•
The timing of the performers is crucial.
•
All about the double act.
Why this farce, day after day?
(Nell on 18; Clov on 26)
Endgame, mime, physical theatre
Silence
HAMM: The whole thing is comical, I grant you that. What about having a good
guffaw, the two of us together?
CLOV: [After reflection] I couldn't guffaw again today.
HAMM: [After reflection] Nor I. [Pause.] I continue then. Before accepting with
gratitude he asks if he may have his little boy with him. (41)
The pause is, invariably and paradoxically, the most effective element of Beckett’s dialogue.
What is not said and what happens between speech is paramount.
Words vs Actions
Constant tension – and sometimes outright contradiction – between what the characters say
and what they do. Clov repeatedly tells Hamm he’s going to leave him, but never does. This
tension is best illustrated at the end of Waiting for Godot.
ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let's go. [They do not move.]
The limits of language: babble, babble…
In Endgame language has ceased to function as an effective vehicle of communication
between one human and another. Words don’t work. The failure – indeed, the inability – of
language is one of the central preoccupations of Beckett’s plays.
The conversation between the characters is stilted, repetitive, and ineffective. They talk
without talking to each other.
NAGG: Can you see me?
NELL: What?
NAGG: Can you see me?
NELL: Hardly (18)
Four times Hamm asks Clov, “Is is not time for my pain-killer?”. Each time he is told “no”, until
finally, on the fifth occasion:
HAMM: Is it not time for my pain-killer?
CLOV: Yes.
HAMM: Ah! At last! Give it to me quick!
[Pause.]
CLOV: There’s no more pain-killer. (46)
The limits of language: babble, babble…
And the characters recognize that words have failed them. As Hamm says:
Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into
children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark.
(45)
Clov towards the end of the play:
I ask the words that remain – sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have
nothing to say. (51)
It is not just that language fails as a vehicle for communication: it imprisons us within a system
that doesn’t work.
HAMM: Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!
CLOV: [Violently.] That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody
awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any
more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. (32)
Clov’s outburst echoes that of Caliban in The Tempest: “You taught me language; and my profit
on’t | Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you | For learning me your language!” (1.ii.5179)
The Theatre of the Absurd
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961)*
Theatre of the Absurd is not a conscious or formal movement. Rather an attitude shared by a
number of playwrights of the mid-twentieth century:
The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic
assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and
found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions.
(23)
Esslin takes the notion of the absurd from Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Camus’s
existentialism posited the purposelessness and meaninglessness of the universe:
A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a
universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an
irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he
lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the
actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity. (Qtd. in Esslin, 23)
* All quotations from the third edition (London: Penguin, 1981).
The Theatre of the Absurd
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961)*
Theatre of the Absurd is not a conscious or formal movement. Rather an attitude shared by a
number of playwrights of the mid-twentieth century:
The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic
assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and
found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions.
(23)
HAMM: Clov!
CLOV: [Impatiently.] What is it?
HAMM: We're not beginning to … to … mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah that's a good
one! (26-7)
The Theatre of the Absurd
Esslin noted that existentialist dramatists sought to express this sense of the absurd, but did so
“in the form of highly lucid and logically constructed reasoning” (24). In other words, new ideas
were expressed using old forms.
The Theatre of the Absurd expressed these ideas and attitudes through a new approach to
form … formlessness:
The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human
condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of
rational devices and discursive thought. While Sartre or Camus express the new content
in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a
unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these arc expressed. (24)
Major playwrights:
• Samuel Beckett
• Eugene Ionesco
• Arthur Adamov
• Jean Genet
• Harold Pinter
The Theatre of the Absurd
Key characteristics of the Theatre of the Absurd
•
Presents – rather than arguing about – the absurdity of the human condition.
•
Abandonment of formal structures of plot, narrative, or consistent character.
•
Shows the paralysis of human thought and action.
•
Engages in “a radical devaluation of language” (Esslin, 26). It is “anti-literary”:
“In the 'literary' theatre, language remains the predominant component. In the antiliterary theatre of the circus or the music hall, language is reduced to a very
subordinate role. The Theatre of the Absurd has regained the freedom of using
language as merely one - sometimes dominant, sometimes submerged - component of
its multidimensional poetic imagery. By putting the language of a scene in contrast to
the action, by reducing it to meaningless patter, or by abandoning discursive logic for
the poetic logic of association or assonance, the Theatre of the Absurd has opened up a
new dimension of the stage.” (Esslin, 406)
•
Props, scenery etc. have the quality of poetic images.
The Tradition of the Absurd
Influences
•
Esslin identifies the popular modes of theatre already discussed – “the anti-literary theatre
of the circus or the music hall” as key traditions from which the Theatre of the Absurd
emerges.
•
Nonsense literature (e.g. Edward Lear’s poetry, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland).
•
Greek drama:
“The Theatre of the Absurd, however grotesque, frivolous, and irreverent it may
appear, represents a return to the original, religious function of the theatre—the
confrontation of man with the spheres of myth and religious reality. Like ancient
Greek tragedy and the medieval mystery plays and baroque allegories, the Theatre of
the Absurd is intent on making its audience aware of man's precarious and mysterious
position in the universe ... The difference is merely that in ancient Greek tragedy … the
ultimate realities concerned were generally known and universally accepted
metaphysical systems, while the Theatre of the Absurd expresses the absence of any
such generally accepted cosmic system of values.” (402)
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
•
Graduate of Trinity College, Dublin (1923; 1931). Spends two
years lecturing at the L’Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.
•
Whilst in Paris he befriends James Joyce and publishes an
essay defending Joyce’s work in 1929 – his first published
work.
•
He joined the French Resistance in 1940.
•
Novels: More Pricks that Kicks (1934), Murphy (1938), Molloy
(1951), Malone Dies (1951), Watt (1953), The Unnamable
(1953), and How It Is (1961).
•
Plays for stage include: Waiting for Godot (premiered in Paris
in 1951),Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and Happy
Days (1961).
•
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 but refuses to
attend the ceremony.
Beckett and translation
Beckett wrote both Waiting for Godot and Endgame in French and subsequently translated
them into English. Why?
Beckett wished to avoid “style” – the temptation to be elegant and lyrical. Writing in a second
language (and then translating that text into his mother tongue) was his way of achieving
discipline and austerity in his use of words.
Some Approaches to Endgame
1. Beyond comedy and tragedy
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” (Nell to Nagg, 20)
Esslin noted that the Theatre of the Absurd “transcends the categories of comedy and tragedy
and combines laughter with horror” (411).
The possibility of tragedy presumes meaning, form, catharsis – all of which have been shown to
be an illusion by the dropping of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust.
If there is tragedy, it is to be found in the continuance of life, not in death. The very notion of an
“end” is impossible (as this would imply form and narrative). But this paradox is itself the source
of irony and comedy.
Some Approaches to Endgame
2. Time
[Exit Clov. Brief ring of alarm offstage. Enter Clov with alarm-clock. He holds it against
Hamm's ear and releases alarm. They listen to it ringing to the end. Pause.]
Fit to wake the dead! Did you hear it?
HAMM: Vaguely.
CLOV: The end is terrific!
HAMM: I prefer the middle. (34)
Time is without meaning. The play is set in post-apocalyptic moment (or, at least, the characters
believe themselves to inhabit such a moment) – after the end of time.
There is no – and can be no – progression for either the characters or the play. The characters
repeat words, conversations, stories, actions. They play out a routine that repeats itself day
after day: “time was never and time is over” (52)
The first words of the play:
Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon
grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible
heap. (12)
Some Approaches to Endgame
2. Time
XENO’S PARADOX OF THE GRAIN OF MILLET
A single grain makes no sound when falling but a thousand grains do make a sound. How can a
thousand nothings amount to something?
THE SORITES PARADOX
Removing a single grain from a heap of grains would not turn the heap into a non-heap, nor
would the removal of two grains, or three etc. At what point does the removal of a grain
transform a heap into a non-heap? Is a single remaining grain still a heap?
Some Approaches to Endgame
3. Play
“Endgame” is a chess term. It denotes that
phase of the game when only a few pieces
remain on the board.
An “endgame study” is a composed chess
endgame position presented as a puzzle. The
solver must find a way for one side (usually
White) to win or draw, as stipulated, against
any moves the other side plays – and from a
seemingly impossible position.
Hamms first words are:
“Me – [he yawns] – to play.” (12)
Does the stage become a chessboard on which
the characters move around in search off a
solution to an impossible endgame?
Some Approaches to Endgame
4. Masters and servants
Like Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, Hamm and Clov are a double act. But they’re
also master and servant.
Master and servant depend on one another. Hamm, blind and wheelchair-bound, needs Clov;
but Clov needs Hamm, for he alone has access to the food supply. Theirs is a grim symbiosis.
In his early collection of essays, Beckett wrote: “if love … is a function of man’s sadness,
friendship is a function of his cowardice”* Is human intimacy based on the fear?
HAMM
CLOV
Master
Servant
Father
Son?
The king in a chess game
The pawn (or really another king?)
Prospero
Caliban
Lear
The Fool
*Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 46.
Some Approaches to Endgame
5. An allegory of the mind? Of the pain and death of consciousness?
Hamm, blind and emotional; Clov, performing the function of the senses for him - all
these might well represent different aspects of a single personality, repressed
memories in the subconscious mind, the emotional and the intellectual selves. Is Clov
then the intellect, bound to serve the emotions, instincts, and appetites, and trying to
free himself from such disorderly and tyrannical masters, yet doomed to die when its
connection with the animal side of the personality is severed? (Esslin, 66)
Bare stage with one door and two windows: the inside of a skull?
Some Approaches to Endgame
6. Metatheatre
Ham – An inexpert performer; an ineffective or over-emphatic actor, one who rants or overacts.
(OED).
HAMM: [Angrily.] An aside, ape! Did you never hear an aside before? [Pause.] I'm
warming up for my last soliloquy. (49)
Hamm is self-consciously Shakespearean:
• “My kingdom for a nightman!” (22)
• “Our revels now are ended” (39)
Hamm wants to be the storyteller, the author, the great player. He is trapped in the grandiose
words and cliches of the theatre.
Clov turns the telescope on the audience:
[He gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.] I see … a multitude … in
transports … of joy. (25)