Endgame: Cinema and Tradition

When asked who the Godot of his 1952 play Waiting for Godot is, he replied, “If I knew, I would have said so in the play (de la Durantaye).” Of the German version of Endgame, Endspiel, Beckett said to an interviewee, there are “no riddles and no solutions. For such ponderous matters you can always go to universities, churches, cafés de commerce, etc. (9)” I take this as a ticket to engage with the play so long as it is my thoughts. If Beckett wanted to write a piece of criticism to be debated as right and wrong, then he would have devoted his life to writing on the works of great philosophers and theoreticians. However, he chose to engage in fictions with lives older and vaster than himself as well as you and I. This being said, the performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, directed by Conor McPherson, is an excellent example of how to play a solutionless piece of theatre with irreverent, yet doleful balance. Nagg and Nell’s nostalgic exchanges made my experience especially forlorn. It is easy to see how these two can steal the show. In addition, Hamm and Clov’s relationship is poignantly ambiguous, leaving me to sift through the silences left as the credits role. Despite the ambiguity, silence, and absurdity commonly felt among viewers and readers, there is also an intimate conversation with the tradition of literature whose depth can only be hinted at here. Finally, McPherson and the star-cast fill in the space between Beckett’s dialogues with vibrant hues of grey.

Center stage, our tragic hero—rather, the product of the heroes' exhausted use, Hamm (Michael Gambon), commands more than Clov and his parents' diet. He knows his own story too well. Throughout the play Hamm specifically refers to the dialogue, an underplot, an aside, and soliloquy, as if he has the play itself in mind (Cohn, 8). Far from the figure of Oedipus, the likewise blinded Hamm is vaguely recognizable as a hero at all. He has been worn down by time and the unceasing stories. He is the father who has left Clov’s wishes unfulfilled and who parades Clov around like his pet. This could be similar to an artist and her struggle with tradition; convention; form. An excellent thing to keep in mind though, is that Beckett is working within the tradition of literature. His play adheres to the classical unities and his characters correspond to both comic and tragic character types. Beckett regarded the work as a tragicomedy, blending elements of both. Plautus, a classical practitioner of the form, wrote in the prologue to his play Amphitryon,

I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don't think it would be appropriate to make it consistently a comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I'll make it a tragicomedy…(Lyne & Mukherji)

Plautus expresses to us that Kings and Gods don’t make theatre comic. Neither does a slave make a play tragic. However, in a world that has begun abolishing slavery and establishing rights a global citizen, Plautus’ outline is certainly dated and in need of an update. Enter Endgame.

Clov (David Thewlis) seems bound to Hamm and beckons to him like a servant despite his own objections. One of my favorite elements of Beckett’s play is how this unclear relationship has developed as the play ends; Clov is tired of submitting to Hamm, and Hamm accepts it. As the play goes on, he gradually stops obeying Hamm. This is mirrored in the production, Clov incrementally changes into the final Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag (90). McPherson and Thewlis transform Clov from smock to traveler, from servant to agent. Where the lines blur most is certainly at the end. Is he going back to the kitchen? Will he leave the home? Beckett does not tell us, and neither does McPherson or Thewlis. We are left to wonder. Therefore, Beckett’s play has no happy ending, no resolve. Clov does not accomplish what he has been trying to do for the entire play, that is, leave. We have a comic hero dressed to end triumphantly upon his departure, thus fulfilling the comic convention, only to be left silent in the room staring fixedly at the tragic hero, Hamm.

A cinematic production can accentuate the experiences of individual characters using a variety of shots and angles that the theatre cannot. I think Cinema can produce an experience closer to that of reading (perhaps as a consequence of our consumption of cinema) When I read Hamm, for example, I see a close-up; my mind’s eye moves to see his gestures; I shift between close-ups and busts Hamm and Clov in conversation; I imagine the occasional wide view—like Clov preparing the window curtains for the day. McPherson’s production and Donald Gilligan’s cinematography focus the audience’s attention on aspects of Beckett’s characters that may be missed in the theatre. Of course, the same can be said in the reverse. Nevertheless, I thought that Hamm’s desire to maintain center stage, and therefore our perpetual attention, was nicely balanced by the camera’s movement from one angle and aspect to another. Beckett himself may have had issues with this as his publisher once took legal action when one production in Massachusetts added music (I don’t blame him, they wanted to play Phillip Glass after all) to the production. He said, “Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me… Anybody who cares for the work couldn't fail to be disgusted by this. (McCarthy, 102)” However, I am under the impression that parody, if it is, can be done with tact and can achieve an emotion in harmony with Beckett’s precise language

The opportunity of the cinema makes the experience of Nagg and Nell’s dialogue particularly exciting if not utterly heartbreaking. (Charles Simon), is the aging but ever cogniz

ant male lover and father, and Nell (Jean Anderson), the attentive, stifled wife and mother. The production has reduced them to zombie figures, grey makeup and rotten hands. They each get close-ups, barely alive, stuck in their own trash cans, imagine (or watch the film). The film helped me experience the impending sorrow of their circumstance (it is easy to laugh when your own imagination is running the show, what are the other options?) That Nagg rations his biscuits and tries for two sugar plums suggests that he cares for Nell in some way. He wants to make sure she has food, even if it is a biscuit; in this case it is a dog treat. Yet, his interactions with her are dismissive and his motives driven by the gratification of physical touch and self-fulfilling long form jokes. Nell asks first if it is “time for love?” to which Nagg commands a kiss. When Nagg doesn’t get a kiss, he quickly moves on to his missing tooth. To which Nell inquires further. It becomes the Nagg show, making light of their failing senses. McPherson and Simon’s Nagg is not completely self-interested though. He is curious about Nell’s condition, asking about her hearing, sight, and the sawdust in her trash bin. But the sawdust is not what she has. Why has he gotten it wrong? Does he not have the same? He says, “Your sand then, it’s not important.” But to Nell it is. The material has consequences for her that it doesn’t for Nagg. He fails to consider this, and thus depreciates Nell’s experience. This is quite like chess; we make inferences and interpret; we can reason based on the aggregate data, but it's all conjecture; who knows what the next move will be and what we will miss—what the result will be. This is an element that makes Endgame tragic; it is beyond pure reason. How can Nagg know what he hasn’t learned? The fool goes on alienating his lover because he is too concerned with some self-justifying, self-fulfilling story.

In a letter to a friend, the young playwright, Harold Pinter wrote of Samuel Beckett’s works, “He’s not selling me anything I want to buy; he doesn’t care if I buy or not. Well, I’ll buy his goods because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.” Beckett isn’t the writer who will offer philosophical answers. He isn’t the writer to bestow clever ideals to his readers. Nevertheless, Beckett’s works invite the myriad interpretations that would prefer key to meaning. Endgame is about the destitution of man. Endgame is about a degradation of and alienation from nature. Even, Endgame is a critique on traditional literary conventions. The thing is, Beckett was reading all the old white guys writing about the world, and he decided to write about trousers and decrepit people dying in trash cans.

Work Cited

A Wake for Sam, Performance by Harold Pinter, BBC, 1990. , www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N99S8n2TiA.

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame & Act Without Words. Grove Press.

Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

De la Durantaye, Leland. Beckett’s Art of Mismaking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, 2016. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvjf9z3d.4. Accessed 24 Apr. 2020.

Lyne, Raphael, and Subha Mukherji, editors. Early Modern Tragicomedy. Boydell & Brewer.

McCarthy, Sean. Giving Sam a Second Life: Beckett's Plays in the Age of Convergent Media. University of Texas Press, Austin

McPherson, Conor, director. Endgame. , BBC, 2000.