As soon as last night's production of Endgame let out, I checked the program to calculate Samuel Beckett's age when he wrote it. I make it out to be 51, which was just what I was expecting. I gather Beckett was never the most lighthearted of playwrights, but this particular play is all about the things that are uppermost in your mind as you pass the Big Five-Oh: the increasing imminence of death, the growing presence of physical pain and the big question: if we're just going to die anyway, is anything worth bothering about at all?
I find it a maddening play. If you don't know it, it's about Hamm (Joseph Ziegler), who's blind and confined to a chair, Clov (Diego Matamoros), who attends to his needs, and Hamm's aged parents Nagg (Eric Peterson) and Nell (Maria Vacratsis), who have been (literally) tossed into the trash, whence they cannot escape.
In the bleakest of indoor settings, painted by set designer Julie Fox in fifty shades of grey – but not the fun kind – Hamm orders Clov about a series of pointless, mundane tasks while waiting for the inevitable end. In Hamm's universe, there is no comfort. It's cold and dirty, and the household has run out of everything nice, including (among other things) sugar plums, painkillers, blankets and bicycle-wheels. The experience of the play is not unlike spending an excruciating day or two in an intensive care ward, where what once seemed "normal" becomes an unattainable delight. ("Yesterday!" rhapsodizes Nell.)
My problem with the show is partly that it's so alien to my way of seeing things. I'm with Woody Allen, who, in Hannah and Her Sisters, confronts the same difficult question, but decides it's all worth it if you can experience a few immortal moments (in his case, when laughing at the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup).
But Endgame is undeniably elegant. It opens with a little riff on Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy from – name no coincidence? – Hamm ("What dreams! Those forests! ... Enough, it's time it ended, in the shelter, too. ... And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to... to end."). The play builds repeating and gradually accruing layers of detail, nuance and reference to flesh out Hamm's utterly hopeless existence; one he nonetheless seems to take some satisfaction in.
Fifty-plus years after its first production, Endgame still rings with eerie connections to life of the moment. I felt a disturbing frisson at one of Clov's very first lines: "I can't be punished any more", because it so closely echoes certain words of Ashley Smith, the young woman who took her own life in a federal prison in 2007, heard in videos released recently as evidence of her treatment while in custody. On two occasions, she can be heard saying more or less the same thing in answer to threats of discipline from the guards; her meaning is plain: "You can't make me feel worse than I already do."
In the absurdist view, human life is so awful that you have to laugh about it, but the world of Endgame seems to have run out of laughter when it ran out of sugar plums. One of the few comic lines is also among the bleakest – and to me sums up the world view of the whole play; it comes when Hamm asks Clov whether his father is still alive. "He's crying," Clov tells him. "Then he's living," says Hamm. It's an either-or proposition: living is weeping; the only end of weeping is death.
But perhaps what I find most maddening is that I'm not sure Beckett isn't just tweaking our noses. "Me to play" says Hamm, at the beginning and end of the piece. It's his chess move, that is; he starts the game. And maybe the whole depressing scenario is Beckett's own game. Are we to believe that life's just an imprisoning dungheap, or is Beckett simply forcing us to confront the possibility in case we may choose to believe something else instead?
Just as the characters of Endgame know they're in a play, and refer to that state from time to time, Beckett gives himself away; after all, he made plays. What's more pointless than that in a meaningless universe? No, Beckett believes in meaning; you might say he's all about it.
Hamm even has a tiny moment that almost resembles the warning of Marley's Ghost in A Christmas Carol, in which he refers, however archly, to one of Christianity's central commandments, one that gives a possible meaning for our mortal existence: "All those I might have helped. ... Helped! ... Saved. ... Saved! ... The place was crawling with them. ... Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that! ... Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbor as yourself!" What is one to make of that? I'm eternally hopeful; I have my own answer, which may not be yours.
Daniel Brooks' clear and seamless direction, with the enormous energy and focus of Ziegler and Matamoros, bring all this vexing complexity to the stage in its brutal and inexorable rawness. Love it or hate it, Endgame is a brilliant masterwork. It continues at the Young Centre until November 17.
Photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann. Maria Vacratsis and Eric Peterson in Soulpepper Theatre's production of Endgame.
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