Endgame

Endgame by Samuel Beckett is a one-act play with four characters. Written in French [Fin de partie], it was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in a production that opened on 3 April 1957. Beckett himself later translated the play into English. Along with such works as Waiting for Godot, Endgame is commonly considered to be among Beckett’s most important works.

Characters

Hamm – a blind man unable to stand.

Clov – Hamm’s servant taken in by Hamm as a child; unable to sit.

Nagg – Hamm’s father; has no legs and lives in a dustbin.

Nell – Hamm’s mother; has no legs and lives in a dustbin next to Nagg.

Interpretation

The play portrays a universe that is nearing its end but that could just continue repeating itself. The end that everyone seems to be moving toward is both certain and elusive. The setting and the situation suggest an underground bomb shelter, possibly after a nuclear disaster. Viewers identify the desolate stage as being the post-nuclear apocalypse, the ruins of the Second World War, or the ravaged landscape of Normandy that Beckett drove through in 1945 when serving as a volunteer ambulance driver. The atmosphere of destruction and desolation is also a register of the distress Beckett felt at the time of writing. In 1954 he discovered that his brother Frank had terminal lung cancer. Beckett wrote the play during the agonizing months of illness and death of his brother, causing him anguish, which is surely evident in the preoccupation with ‘the end’ that haunts the play.

Endgame exhibits an awareness of absurdity and of the meaninglessness of the human condition, while also attempting to construct meaning through language and imagination. It represents a cyclical pattern as well as an unavoidable linear progression toward nothingness.

Beckett is often portrayed as the last modernist, but Endgame is not an autobiography. Beckett moved beyond self-portrayal to a modernist impersonality. Like much of the phlegmatic writer’s work, the play purposely withholds any clarity and certainty of reference, just as it withholds any allegiance to post-war attempts to process modern historical experience. In the play, it is not just material things that are scarce. Less effable but more fundamental, is the erosion of meaning and of a value system that a sense of tragedy requires. The character’s view on life is bleak. Parents are kept in rubbish bins, the death of the mother is barely worth a mention, and the sight of a child provokes a brutal response. There are layers of parody and black comedy in the play, and the characters display a mesmerizing vitality and humour despite their stripped- down lives. But also present is a strongly subversive and shocking refusal to value life, family, and progress. Just as Beckett broke down the conventions of traditional theatre, so does Endgame bring the ancient dramatic tragedy into absurd modernity.