Nothing
happens in a Beckett plays. No, this is not entirely true. Very little
happens in Samuel Beckett’s plays. And the very little that happens often
happens several times, until it becomes part of the greater blanket of
nothing. In the form of his
play Endgame, Beckett reveals his interpretation
of life and nothingness, of existence and non-being, of wants and needs. He
completed Endgame in 1956 after many months of frustration and rewrites.
The staging of this work was almost as difficult as its creation, until Beckett
finally found a theater in London that would put on the risky production.
Reviews were mostly grim, and the comparisons to the “better” work,
Waiting for Godot, were frequent. In later productions, it met more critical success,
and the original failure was explained by Endgame being a tricky play to
stage, as so many of Beckett’s deceptively simplistic and minimalist works
were discovered to be. In the decades that have followed the original
production, Endgame has been rightly considered a modern masterpiece.
The staging of Endgame adds to the senses of emptiness, of isolation, and of
desperation. Endgame claustrophobically traps its
characters in a bomb-
shelter-like room with two tiny windows set up high and with curtains drawn.
The audience along with the blind Hamm must rely on the servant Clov’s
descriptions of the
world beyond this hellish house. In a symbolic twist, the
positioning of these windows, along with the other props on the stage seems
to connote the inside of a man’s head, with the characters positioned along
with the props. Thus, the characters onstage become figures of an inner
consciousness, figures that might play within everyone’s minds.
The nontraditional play structure of Endgame is typical Beckett in that
nothing really appears to happen. In this one act play, four characters,
Hamm, his servant Clov and his parents, Nagg and Nell, live out their time in
a state of imprisonment by what some critics see as the years following a
nuclear holocaust of sorts. The characters (with the possible exception of
Nell) are trapped in a constant state of waiting for physical things. Nagg is
waiting for his pap or a change of sand in his dustbin, Hamm is waiting for
his sedative, and Clov is waiting for Hamm to die. Only Nell, who at this point
is too far gone to care, does not proclaim a specific want or need, and her
apathy culminates tragically later in the play.
Beckett does not stop with the staging to create the very specific atmosphere
of barrenness. Adding to the sense of imprisonment and loneliness,
Endgame renders three of its characters immobile. Beckett shoves the elderly
and decrepit Nagg and Nell in garbage cans from which they can only poke
their heads out, while the autocratic and blind Hamm can only sit in his chair
in the center of the stage. Clov, the only one able to move about freely, is
cursed with the inability to sit and is portrayed in constant motion throughout
the play. Springing from these limitations, as well as their original
relationships with each other, the characters co-exist in a twisted world
where the servant appears to need his master as much as his master relies
upon him, where the elderly couple are cut off from each other and their
narrow world and left in dustbins to rot away until their deaths. The
characters both have nowhere to go and no way to get there.
Because of the restrictions set by Beckett, the structure of Endgame is
markedly repetitive and cycle. Trapped in their prison in Endgame, the four
characters constantly seek patterns of life and even create patterns
themselves when life deprives them of the customary routines. Hamm
repeatedly tells his “story” throughout the play. His story serves as one of
many themes of Endgame, upon which Beckett relies since he has all but
done away with any sort of driving actioon in the plot. Another important
device that Beckett employs is the use of the window, through which only
Clov sees and reports. The only window to the outside world, and both
audience and Hamm alike must believe in the descriptions by Clov, who may
or may not be telling the truth, who may or may not see anything at all.
Throughout its single act, Endgame remains very conscious of its role as a
theatrical work. Beckett includes overt allusions to Dante, to Waste Land, to
Shakespeare. These works and many more, possibly some unrecognizable to
any scholar besides Beckett himself, resonate throughout the play. They
align Endgame into the larger living history of drama. For Beckett, drama
reflects life as it goes full circle. And yet, the circle is flat, so the end is the
beginning, the middle is the end, the beginning is the middle.
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