If the Trinity College Drama Society’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a bid to both replicate and ridicule the melancholy that pervades the student body during these horrid pre-spring months, then it’s a success. A despairing play about despair, Endgame is Beckett’s abstruse masterpiece about waiting for nothing, except perhaps death.
Beckett himself described the play as “rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw.” Director Luke Stark lucidly captured the banal repetitiveness of Beckett’s work, and the original music of Akos Kokai suggested the desperation of people resigned to “the end.”
Two such people are Hamm (Alistair Scott), a seemingly insane blind paraplegic, and his son/slave Clov (Michael Brigham). Neither can survive without the other: Hamm provides food and shelter for Clov, and Clov feeds and cares for Hamm. They are both trapped in Hamm’s sanctuary, unable to escape. Also present are Hamm’s parents, Nagg (Brian Jackson) and Nell (Clare Whittingham), who live in trashcans near Hamm, but out of reach.
Alistair Scott, a first-year student but already a veteran to the Trinity stage, brought shocking intensity to the role of the sightless master of the house. Resigned to a chair, and with his eyes hidden by dark sunglasses, Scott relied on his voice to convey the desperation of a doomed man, and did so with energy and just the right amount of humour. As Hamm’s partner and slave Clov, Michael Brigham was unfortunately overshadowed by Scott’s vivid performance, but this marginalization just added to his character’s pathos. Brigham’s performance at times lacked the passion to express the misery Endgame requires, but his desperation increased as the play progressed, and by the end he had moulded Clov into the being Beckett intended. Jackson and Whittingham shone in their respective roles. Jackson was commanding as Nagg, Hamm’s father, outwardly menacing to hide his impotence and lack of control over his son, and Whittingham gave Hamm’s mother just the right mix of despair and naïveté.
In this play where nothing happens just once, the repetition started to drag after a while. Although undoubtedly intentional, it still made it increasingly difficult to care about the wretchedness of the characters. As Hamm says, “Do you not think this has gone on long enough?” It was the performances, particularly Scott’s, that preserved the show. His energy and ardour kept the desolation watchable, instead of inspiring the audience to flee in their own desperation.
Overall, Endgame was banal, repetitive, desperate, and melancholic—exactly the way it’s supposed to be.
