Fintan O'Toole and Gerry Colgan review two plays staged for the Beckett centenary celebrations
Endgame, Gate Theatre, Dublin
Most of Samuel Beckett's work is about the mystery of persistence. Why, it asks, do things and people go on when there is no longer any apparent reason for their existence? But Endgame, the play that followed Waiting for Godot in 1957, isn't just about futile persistence. It forces its audience to experience it. Its daring lies in the way it challenges, and even taunts, the audience with the question: "Why do you persist with this boring, meaningless play when you know that nothing is going to happen?"
The teasing begins with the opening line: "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished." But it's not nearly finished. We may be in a dying world, after Noah's flood or a nuclear apocalypse, but the end that is nigh does not arrive.
As it goes on, the blind, immobilised tyrant Hamm, and his servant Clov, keep up a running commentary on the play itself: "This is not much fun"; "What's happening, what's happening?"; "Things are livening up"; "Do you not think this has gone on long enough?"; "I'm warming up for my last soliloquy"; "We're not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?"
The mockery of the audience reaches its pinnacle when Clov looks out at us with a telescope: "I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy." He pauses, looks at the telescope and remarks sardonically: "That's what I call a magnifier."
That we are patently not in transports of joy is, of course, the joke. If we laugh we are experiencing something that touches on the strangeness of theatre itself: our ability to enjoy our own discomfort. That enjoyment is rooted in something deceptively simple: gallows humour. We stay because the tedium, the taunting, the despair, the bewilderment, are funny. But the laugh is not a release, it is a recognition that when things are desperate they cannot be serious.
This calls, in production, for a very fine balance. Playing Endgame for laughs misses the point that the humour is not a relief from the bleakness but a part of it. But equally there has to be a dexterity, an alertness to nuance, a verbal finesse, that allows the humour to emerge on its own.
Endgame is at one level a clever variation on the old straight man/funny man routine. Here, it's the straight man, Clov, who gets the laughs. He's funny because he's not joking. Though there are many fine things in Charles Sturridge's production, it lacks this comic subtlety. It is superbly designed by Eileen Diss (her set, without being heavy-handed, perfectly captures the self-conscious theatricality of the play) and extraordinarily well lit by Davy Cunningham. Tom Hickey and Georgina Hale bring a striking fluency and a carefully restrained poignancy to the roles of Nagg and Nell, the legless parents whom Hamm keeps in dustbins. Kenneth Cranham's Hamm is richly textured: harsh, loud, monstrously conceited, full of self-regarding sentimentality, he is also very obviously in the throes of a painful death.
The difficulty lies in Sturridge's slow, stately pacing, and in the way he orchestrates the crucial exchanges between Cranham and Peter Dinklage's Clov. Dinklage brings great assurance to the physical business of the play, its repetitions and hesitations, and injects a savagery into the role that makes clear the servant's hatred of the master. But the combination of a harsh Hamm and a savage Clov makes the overall tone too emphatic. Too much is underlined, too little allowed to emerge.
The play tends to shout when it ought to speak in mordant mutters. It is not that the humour is absent but that, rather than being intertwined with the bleak evocation of a post-apocalyptic world, it takes the form of comic relief.
This lack of alacrity in the interplay of Hamm and Clov tends to slow the play down beyond its necessary sense of perverse elongation. The Beckettian double take - this is ridiculously tedious but curiously entertaining - tends to become a single take: this is going on a bit. Fintan O'Toole
Ends tonight. Matinee today at 2.30pm
Beckett's Ghosts, Project Upstairs, Dublin
Of the four short plays offered by Bedrock for the Beckett centenary celebrations, the last shall be first. Not I is the famous work in which a disembodied Mouth distils a woman's life into a staccato torrent of words, while the dim figure of a sexless Auditor listens silently.
It is a work of genius that gets a hugely effective treatment here from Deirdre Roycroft. She injects amazing clarity and intensity into her delivery of the text, orchestrated by director Jason Byrne. The same cannot be said of Breath. Here the curtain sweeps aside to reveal a huge heap of bones rather than the prescribed litter of miscellaneous rubbish, and two faint cries are closer to screams. Director Amanda Coogan inexplicably misses the author's style and vision.
Jason Byrne also directs the opening play, A Piece of Monologue with Andrew Bennett as the old man recalling his life, now ending. Birth was the death of him, and he counts the seconds and the fleeting years. His life has been solitary, and as it ebbs he talks of it in mesmeric words. The actor's dark-brown voice is an excellent fit for the text and its meanings.
Then there is That Time, with a technical dimension not often found in Beckett. A man is besieged by three voices coming from three directions. They speak of youth and love, of desperation and despair - and they are his own. Ned Dennehy, directed by Jimmy Fay, plays both Listener and Voices, catching the true spirit of the play. Gerry Colgan
Runs to April 22nd
