There are very, very few actors blessed with the ability to hold an audience rapt for a good five minutes of dialogue-free stage business—and Bill Irwin is one of them. Endgame, now off-Broadway at Irish Rep, opens with the rubber-limbed Irwin as Clov, stooped and knock-kneed, shuffling to a back wall to open curtain after curtain, whereupon he reveals brick wall after brick wall. He hauls his stiff legs and hunched back across the stage through a door, and returns with a stepladder…which he drags back to each brick wall. After climbing up the steps precariously, he grabs a thigh and swings it over the ladder to reach the top and slide open a tiny window. Reverse, repeat, reverse, repeat, reverse…
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better Beckett interpreter than Irwin, who’s been featured in two star-studded New York City revivals of Waiting for Godot and also created and performed his own intimate salute to the Irish playwright (On Beckett, which premiered at Irish Rep in 2018). But John Douglas Thompson—who plays the blind, chair-bound, imperious Hamm—is every inch Irwin’s match in this laughably excruciating march toward death.
Beckett characterized Endgame as “dark as ink,” “difficult and elliptic,” and “more inhuman than Godot.” He also called it his favorite play. Well, “the one I dislike the least.” But it’s still supposed to be funny. A tall order considering you’re in a dystopian wasteland (the appropriately bunker-like set is by Charlie Corcoran), one main character is an immobile narcissist, the other is a fast-decaying servant type, and a husband and wife (Nagg and Nell, played by Joe Grifasi and Patrice Johnson Chevannes, respectively) reside nearby in his-and-her trash bins. They lost their legs in a tandem bicycle accident. But they laugh about it! As Nell observes, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Lest you feel uncomfortable chuckling at the parade of misery in front of you, Beckett has just given you permission to do so.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Thompson plays Hamm just as the character name implies—as a ham-handed actor; his star, and body, is failing, but he refuses to go gentle into that good night. (Watching this performance, one envisions him as James Tyrone Sr. in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.) In his hands, all of Hamm’s nonsense and non sequiturs somehow make sense: “Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” he implores to everyone, and to no one in particular. “Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbor as yourself!” And he banters brilliantly with Irwin—more impressive considering that Thompson, whose eyes are closed and shielded by dark glasses for the play’s 85 minutes, can’t even see his co-star.
Director Ciarán O’Reilly adopts a less-is-more approach—no fanfare, no flourishes, no deviating from Beckett’s intricately detailed stage directions—that places the audience squarely in the role of interpreters. In other words, it’s on us to figure out what Endgame means. Good news: There are no right or wrong answers.
Endgame opened Feb. 2, 2023, at Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through April 9. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
