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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2022
The last thing that I expected when I decided to direct a production of Endgame a few months ago was that I would become more and more impressed with it. I had seen Samuel Beckett's play when it was first acted in this country, at the Cherry Lane in New York, and I had come away with no desire to dance in the streets. The play seemed much less impressive than Waiting for Godot—too simple, too simple-minded even. I had been amused occasionally, moved not at all. The philosophical implications, implicit in the title, seemed neither startling nor particularly perceptive; the assumption that this is the worst of all possible worlds seems as silly as the bromide that it is the best, a point made sensibly by the creators of Candide a few years ago when they provided that Pangloss and the pessimistic Martin be played by the same actor.
In the production I worked with we translated the English boot into American and let Clov wear galoshes, which not only got us an extra laugh on “I must have put on my boots,” but also, considering all the talk about the impossibility of its raining, gave us the same efEect that Beckett must have hoped to get by asking Clov to carry a raincoat and umbrella in the last moments of the play.
This device of Beckett’s, incidentally, is a strain on the memory of the actor. Although the exchanges are simple enough to learn, the repeated refrain lines make it difficult to remember the order in which they come. At one performance of the production on which I worked, one of the actors took off from one of the familiar lines, leaving ten pages of unspoken dialogue behind him. Perhaps the device is also a built-in protection because, from another such line, the actors back-tracked and picked up the missing pages without anyone—give or take a few Beckett enthusiasts—realizing that a small disaster had been averted.
This line and the boy whom Clov may have seen from the window may be of comfort to any Beckett reader who chooses to find a note of hope in the playwright’s black picture, but Hamm’s words about the boy, “If he exists hell die there or he’ll come here,” should take the edge off that possibility. If one must have comfort, take it in Beckett’s own vitality.
