STC's Endgame

Samuel Beckett is revered as an absurdist avant-garde writer and playwright whose works frequently break with the conventions of the time and forge new paths through the literary landscape. Perhaps most well-known for Waiting for Godot, his work offers a dismally bleak and darkly tragicomic outlook on life, but try as we might now to bring a freshness to these sixty-year-old plays, it feels like Beckett’s original relevance is now wearing thin and that these works are starting to show their age.

Premiered in 1957, Endgame famously stars Hamm (a man who is blind and cannot stand), his servant Clov (who is unable to sit), and his parents Nell and Nagg (who are both legless, and live in garbage bins). Bound as each of them are to their positions on stage, the play has a certain staticness to it, a caged-in-ness to it, whereby nobody can move, no one can leave, and the only way out is death. It is undeniably nihilistic in its view of the world, and it makes for gruelling viewing.