Samuel Beckett – Endgame

Author: Samuel Beckett

Okay, I’m afraid you will have to bear with me on this review, dear reader. Not because I don’t really have anything to say about the latest play I’ve been told to read during my last term as an English undergraduate, but rather because after finishing this piece, I’m still rather torn as to how I feel about it.

As a play which premiered in 1957 at the Royal Court in London, and set in a post-apocalyptic world, it’s easy to see the preoccupation it seems to have with the hopelessness brought on by war. On the surface, Endgame is a rather depressing play about four protagonists, all of whom live out a miserable and inane existence together. After the nuclear war, the now blinded character of Hamm is unable to stand, his servant Clov is unable to sit…and his (literally) legless parents live in two dustbins downstage. (At this point, I must confess to constantly being reminded of the character ‘Grouch’ from the Muppets each time these bins are mentioned, which didn’t help my reading of the play).

Taking a look beneath the gloomy surface however, reveals a rather dark, satirical side to the writing which (once seen), hits you over the head repeatedly until you’re almost begging for mercy. That isn’t to say that this piece is necessarily negatively repetitive (it is repetitive in some instances, but thankfully not superfluously so) but it does have the same effect as a modernist painting. It’s better viewed if you tilt your head to the side and squint a little.

In terms of the subject matter, it’s a testament to Beckett in his ability to jump from serious to nonsensical to downright humorous dialogue at the drop of a hat. Despite the overall message of this play being something which wouldn’t exactly make you cry with laughter, there are instances where it’s almost impossible to refrain from smiling before you’re once again plunged into the vat of black satire. Despite being written over 50 years ago, with the current climate of this planet being how it is, the theme of nuclear fallout is still eerily applicable. This point isn’t perhaps one that works to the favour of the writing itself…but it does mean that half a century later, the audience is able – to some degree – to identify with the piece.

The pace of this play is quick. The characters tend to talk to one another (or to themselves in some cases) in single sentences. My earlier comment about the repetition of dialogue is applicable here. Due to these short bursts of speech, when a character either repeats themselves or someone else, it doesn’t seem to drag on for any length of time, although admittedly, I personally found the technique to get a little tiresome after a while.

I mentioned at the start of this review that I was undecided as to how I felt about this play, and despite most of the comments I’ve put thus far being positive, this still holds true. In a play (or any piece of literature, really) in which little to nothing happens, I come to expect instead some sort of dialogue which will make me want to sit down and consider its implications. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t really find that here. There are one or two interesting observations made by the characters, but on the whole once I managed to find some of the underlying themes to the play, I recoiled to a state of – dare I say it – apathy.

Unlike other modernist works, this particular piece of literature didn’t evoke any emotional response from me. I didn’t really care what happened to the characters, and I wasn’t intrigued about how or why the post-apocalyptic world had come to such a state. Even though we’re never told, I wouldn’t have bothered asking anyway.

Then again, although I can’t imagine why, perhaps that’s what Beckett aimed for. Those modernists always seemed to have an agenda of some sort.