Endgame review

This past week, violent storms have lashed our shores, turning land and sea an unrelenting, apocalyptic grey. A similarly dystopian sight lurks outside the cell-like room in which blind, wheelchair-using Hamm, his cowed manservant Clov and his elderly parents Nell and Nagg pass long, futile days. But there is a difference. Beyond their small, high windows nothing is stirring. The tides have stilled. Nature has ground to a halt. The end can’t come soon enough.

Sabine Dargent’s curving, brutalist concrete set – the colour of an angry sea – enfolds this doomed quartet in a bleak co-dependence. Katie Davenport’s utilitarian, mud-coloured costumes and Isabella Byrd’s cold, blue, steely lighting complete the stark surrealism that fuels Beckett’s austere dramatic vision.

But Danya Taymor’s well-cast production goes down a refreshingly alternative route, pitting cruelty against compassion, riffing on a short but profound exchange between Hamm and Clov in which the latter asks his master why he thinks he is so obedient to him. Hamm replies that it is, perhaps, due to “a kind of great compassion”. How significant then that the very word compassion means to suffer together.

Frankie Boyle’s softly spoken, gently menacing performance transforms the monstrous Hamm into a deeply troubled human, whose imagination is coloured by images of green fields and forests, blossoms and living things. Immobile of body but fleet of mind and speech, he appears organically connected to his grubby, flesh-coloured wheelchair, which Clov hauls around as though locked in battle with an alien creature.  Imperious yet needy, Hamm rages against his debilitating condition while milking it shamelessly, throwing out unreasonable demands then almost immediately regretting them.

In counterpoint, Robert Sheehan wraps Clov’s knowing wit and resignation in a cloak of intense, precisely timed physicality and dark humour. He is both Hamm’s longed-for son and the conduit for his impatience and frustration. Torn between loyalty and self-preservation, Sheehan brings poignancy and an unexpected elegance to Clov’s final break for freedom.

Taymor adroitly navigates the shifting power struggle betwixt and between this weird little family of psychologically misshapen characters, one minute heartlessly scoring points off one another, the next begging pardon for past wrongs inflicted and pain caused.

As is so often the case with Beckett, the play resounds with startling echoes of the times in which we are living. Old and wrinkled, squashed into dustbins and tossed the occasional biscuit, Nell and Nagg (Gina Moxley and Seán McGinley) show touching flashes of their old flirtatious relationship, while resigning themselves to a sad future of physical separation and neglect. They have only fond memories of the past to cling on to. Parallels with the suffering caused by plague, conflict and climate change in our own little world are almost too painful to contemplate.