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Endgame – Roslyn Parker Theatre – Time Out Australia (09apr15)

09 Apr 2015 /
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Time Out Australia
Jason Catlett
April 9, 2015

4/5 stars 31 Mar-09 May, Theatre, Walsh Bay Critics Choice

Andrew Upton and Hugo Weaving re-team for more Beckett

You’re unlikely ever to find a more enjoyable production of Samuel Beckett’s bleak absurdist drama than this one directed by Andrew Upton for the Sydney Theatre Company. As in Beckett’s earlier and far more celebrated Waiting for Godot, almost nothing happens, repeatedly. Like his later underrated Happy Days, the non-action takes place in some vaguely post-apocalyptic world inhabited by a few bored and bewildered weirdos. They reminisce incoherently, bicker and talk rubbish, doing nothing more significant than putting a handkerchief over someone’s head, or moving a ladder pointlessly from window to window. Beckett’s astonishing achievement was to write challenging and truly revolutionary plays within these apparently disqualifying constraints. The wonderful achievement of Upton and his crew here is to make that horrendous landscape of human worthlessness a delight to watch.

The most obvious component of the STC’s superb stagecraft is the towering set by Nick Schlieper, exquisitely lit yet continuously intimidating, somewhere between a brutalist lighthouse and a nuclear fallout shelter. An appropriately irritating drip plummets regularly down four floors onto the stage. Beckett began his text with these directions: “Bare interior. / Grey Light. / Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn.”  It continues with a typically precise specification of the manservant Clov’s inexplicable household chores involving a “small stepladder,” here lengthened, to the greater discomfort of the physically challenged Clov.
Like the dialogue, Clov’s movements make little sense if viewed at a macro level, but by applying great commitment and skill to his part, Tom Budge gives such a convincing impression of a man genuinely trying to cope with his preposterous predicament that this goofy sidekick becomes an impressive character worthy of considerable sympathy.
Clov’s wheelchair-bound master is Hamm, here played with transformative originality by Hugo Weaving. In a famous but arguably futile attempt to understand the play, the great German sociologist Theodor Adorno compared Hamm to Hamlet, even though the only obvious resemblance is in the name. On paper Hamm is an utter bastard who constantly torments not only the hapless Clov but also his parents Nagg and Nell, who dwell in the same room in matching his-and-hers garbage bins. Any resemblance to the palace at Elsinore, Horatio, Gertrude and her first husband, or to Shakespeare’s noble and flowery language, or the Prince of Denmark’s heroic dramatic situation, is strictly by stark contrast. Hamm has almost nothing to react to but the void in which he finds himself confined.
Weaving’s achievement is to animate this severely impaired non-hero as a vivacious, almost endearing master of his own universe: king of a nutshell. Fuelled by a bonfire of charisma, Weaving turns Happ’s insufferably tedious monologues into joyful entertainment.
Beckett’s trick of having Hamm bribe Nagg with a lolly to listen to his stories comes off a treat thanks to the priceless spectacle of the elastic face of Bruce Spence in pancake makeup reacting to his son’s repetitive diatribes. Sarah Peirse completes this extraordinary family portrait as Nagg’s long-suffering wife Nell, keeping the dysfunctionality real in a world of bewildering emotional shadows. Costume designer Renée Mulder deserves an award just for Nagg and Nell’s matching Addams Family hairdos, or for Hamm’s “old stancher” (stauncher), the shroud-like dirty handkerchief he retreats under when life gets too hard.
Beckett’s vision of human existence is so absurd that both the audience and actors are constantly tempted to throw up their hands and dismiss it as, well, absurd, but Upton’s crew manage to stick with it faithfully—almost lovingly if that’s possible—at every moment. Weaving seems to be thriving on the grimness, shrouded in his hellish armchair on casters, despite the constant fear that Clov will leave him helpless. Beckett’s carefully constructed machine runs smooth and clear, notwithstanding its outward appearance of a rickety contraption. The STC has done a great service to a masterpiece that is at risk of being overlooked or dismissed as a second rate specimen from a period of theatre that has lost relevance to today. They have made it fresh, stylish, and even fun.