1. The Kreutzer Sonata
2. The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice
3. Endgame
4. Annie Get Your Gun
5. Bedroom Farce

London,

Mark Rylance is a masterclass in Hamm acting in Endgame

By Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard  16.10.09

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”, says the legless old woman Nell in Samuel Beckett’s apocalyptic play. It’s a perverse claim, typical of Beckett, yet in Complicite’s claustrophobic production unhappiness does provide comedy.  

A blind man, Hamm, squirms in a wheelchair. His servant, Clov, cannot sit down and staggers around the stage; we sense he would like to go elsewhere but is inextricably bound to his master. In two bins lurk Hamm’s parents, Nell and her similarly disabled husband Nagg. They and Clov are conventionally thought of as the three nails on which Hamm (a truncated hammer) crashes down. Yet the interdependence of Hamm and Clov is clear: they share their suffering, and so do we. 

In chess, the endgame begins when there are just a few pieces left on the board. Crucially, it does not have to result in a decisive conclusion, since stalemate is always a possibility. Beckett’s characters seem trapped in that condition. They inhabit a depleted world, tormented by memories of a better past where there were sugar plums and flourishes of greenery.

They return repeatedly to images of this past — Nell lapses into a reverie at the mere mention of “yesterday” — and the future seems unimaginable. 
In 1957 the Lord Chamberlain’s office refused the play a licence because Beckett would not amend a line about God: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” He eventually relented and changed “bastard” to “swine”. Here the offending word is restored. 

This is as it should be, for Beckett is the most linguistically sensitive of writers, and amid the play’s remorseless asperity there’s poetry — given brilliant expression by director Simon McBurney, who imbues every blighted element of the drama with a flicker of humour.
 
Mark Rylance brings mercurial fury and a haunted bittersweetness to the role of Hamm. Seated throughout, he nonetheless gives a performance of kinetic intensity. His modulations are adroit, though occasionally a bit immodestly telegraphed.

One moment he resembles a dyspeptic club bore, the next a forsaken manchild; he is a king, a seer and a Christ figure, but also a hysteric and a stingy little bully.

Simon McBurney’s stiff-legged Clov recalls a primitive wind-up toy, at once downtrodden and energetically resentful, while Miriam Margolyes is a touching Nell.

The design, by Tim Hatley, is a masterpiece of bleakness. Two high windows are eyes letting light into the set’s skull-like chamber; its mean mouth is a swing door brilliantly contrived to squeak in two different ways. 

Yet even as Beckett reduces the world to a dungeon where mankind totters towards its end, he seems to intimate that art is the richest verification of our being imaginatively alive. 

Beckett described Endgame as “rather difficult and elliptical”. He wasn’t joking. Some, inevitably, will complain that next to nothing happens, or that it’s too desolate.

Nevertheless, it is not easy to imagine a much better production of the play than this one. 
Until 5 December; 020 7432 4220.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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