A new production of “Endgame” stars Bill Irwin, who might be the most celebrated clown in America, and John Douglas Thompson, a formidable Shakespearean actor. Their different performance styles help open up new meanings in Samuel Beckett’s text.
Samuel Beckett’s play “Endgame,” now up at the Irish Repertory Theatre, under the direction of Ciaran O’Reilly, begins with a wordless spectacle. A man moves around the stage, drawing curtains back to reveal not the windows that the audience expects but one brick wall after another. There are two excruciatingly small openings in the brick, like portholes on a ship, which take a while—and a ladder—to pry open.
Clov works for Hamm , an imperious blind man who sits in a chair bolted to a wheeled platform—a kind of makeshift wheelchair. Hamm bosses Clov around incessantly, issuing contradictory orders at maximum volume, keeping him in perpetual transit, a purgatory of fetching and delivering, between an offstage kitchen and the chair, which Hamm insists be placed “bang in the center” of the room—that is, until, a breath later, he chides, “A little too far to the left.
We never learn why Clov and Hamm are here, or precisely why Clov continues, day after day, to obey a tyrant who can’t walk or see. Still less explicable is the fact that Hamm’s legless parents, Nagg and Nell , are in metal trash cans onstage. Hamm regards them contemptuously: he calls his father his “progenitor” at one point, and a “fornicator” later on. The one locus of potential sweetness resides in the relationship between the two old-timers.
“Endgame” was first staged in 1957, four years after “Waiting for Godot” premièred. But Beckett wrote “Endgame” first, and later on he cited the lesser-known work as his favorite of his plays. This new production, dismaying in its simplicity but surprising in how many laughs it finds amid the gray, makes it easy to agree with Beckett. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell says. O’Reilly and his company make that true here.
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