The Sydney Theatre Company experience of weaving Endgame

Sydney Theatre Company's production of Endgame brought to surface, the deep-seated comedy of unhappiness in Beckett's play. The performance was keyed at the level of music hall and vaudeville, using that aspect of Beckett's theatre, not to neutralize its profound sense of philosophical gloom but to establish a dialectically contrastive framework. The actors played it full on using the slapstick against Beckett's insistence on colourlessness. While it worked with Hamm, brilliantly played by Hugo Weaving, showing great understanding in the ambiguous feelings involved. Though he did overplay the comic bits, he also fused great insight into Hamm's majestically frustrated and sardonic monologues. Tom Budge as Clov was excellent as a vaudeville clown but a touch flat, lacking in the perfect tragi-comic or should I say comi-tragic balance of hope and despair, so very essential in Beckett. As he oscillated between the forced deadpan of a poker-face and a laboured vaudeville delivery, the expressions that lined his face looked hasty. Weaving whose face broke into the complex poise of thoughts in transition was more balanced. I didn't like the way Nell and Nagg were played. Their sentimentalism and hysteria were not marked with the necessary self-reflexivity and Nell's beautiful lines about the deep clean waters of Lake Como and Nagg's story about the English tailor which contains some of the best writing in the play fell somewhat flat on their faces. 

The set, costumes and everything else were more or less faithful to Beckett and though all of it was good, these components did not show a striking adaptive originality. Having said that, I would agree with Edward Albee, that playwrights like Shakespeare and Beckett do not need a great deal of theatrical adaptation; so precise and yet so open is the material. The gesticulations of Clov clearly overstepped Beckettian limits but Hamm provided a much needed calmative by beautifully dramatizing what Beckett had famously called the 'power of the text to claw' in Endgame. All movement was meticulously choreographed and Clov's opening scene where he measured the sheets while folding and unfolding them at the same time, the way he carried the ladder and Hamm's counting of Clov's steps as he went up the ladder were all done with an eye for Beckettian details and nuances from the oeuvre as a whole. The light was apposite and so was the costume. Overall a very good performance which could have been great, had the rest of the cast matched Hugo Weaving's Hamm. It's more than watchable only for him if not anything else. I look forward to him doing more Beckett after Vladimir and Hamm. Let him weave Krapp next! Fingers crossed. Spoool!!!