Though he has often spoken on stage, Bill Irwin made his first memorable impressions simply by moving. He’s hardly ever, of course, moved simply. Had he been born a half-century earlier, he would likely have become a silent film star along with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd.
Since he wasn’t, he developed one of his earliest works, The Regard of Flight (1983) almost as if it were a silent film. (It was accompanied by solo piano.) For the inspired piece, he found any number of ways to manipulate his body for non-stop comic effect.
Or for other sorts of effect. Now appearing in director’s Ciarán O’Reilly’s pithy revival of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 Endgame, Irwin’s moves look very much like variations on and extensions of his Regard of Flight hyperkinetics. (The Regard of Flight includes a brief reference to Beckett, who’s obviously been a strong influence on MacArthur Fellowship-winner Irwin.)
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Opening the play not quite alone on set designer Charlie Corcoran’s dilapidated grey palace with two tiny windows, the actor of the habitually embarrassed uncertainty expression immediately impresses as browbeaten and endlessly punished servant Clov. That’s even as he turns Beckett’s explicit stage directions calling for a ladder into an opportunity for creating one of his own signature routines.
Another way of saying this — perhaps a broader way of putting it — is that Irwin seems to have destined himself to take on Clov, mastering the sad clown definitively. I’ve only seen a handful of Endgame presentations, but my guess is that no one has ever done this role of a lost soul better, and no one ever will. Clov is so lost he’s even unable to sit. So, make sure to watch for Irwin attempting unsuccessfully to imitate Auguste Rodin’s “Thinker.”
Of course, in Beckett’s four-character and not unfamiliar exercise on futility, three others appear and in their own diverse ways are as unusual as Clov. Under a sheet in a chair on casters at stage center and unveiled when Clov has completed his ladder number is Hamm, whom John Douglas Thompson plays sitting only. Hamm is blind—this is revealed when a handkerchief over his face is removed—and bereft of legs, completely unable to care for himself.
Confined, Thompson cannot be said to have Irwin’s show-off mobility opportunity, but commanding presence he always is, he’s able to equal Irwin’s prowess with his own blank gazes and with the resonant voice he regularly exercises. (He was heard and seen most recently as Shylock in Theatre for a New Audience’s The Merchant of Venice.) His authority means that the Hamm-Clov balancing act is perfectly calibrated here.
Director O’Reilly sees to that as well. He must. Endgame is Beckett’s visiting the notion of codependence, a conflicted version of camaraderie he’d already focused on when Waiting for Godot‘s Vladimir and Estragon wrangled with each other in a different desolate space. Using a whistle hung around his neck, Hamm continually summons Clov and so seems to have the upper hand in the relationship, but only seems to. Beckett disallows that.
Neither does any upper-hand status accrue by the conclusion of a play about an unnamed game in which Hamm and Clov are waiting for their own Godot. In this spin, however, they’re not waiting for an endless series of similar days to inch. They’re attending the actual end of something that could be death — or could be something less terminal, though terminal all the same. It may be their anticipating the finish of a comradeship that may ultimately have no possible finish, as too many dependent relationships do not and seemingly cannot.
Becket adds to his typical morbid fun with Nagg (Joe Grifasi) and Nell (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), Hamm’s parents, who live in side-by-side trash cans a few feet to Hamm’s right. From time to time, they pop up from their restricting metal homes to bicker and coo and make Beckettian pronouncements like Nell’s “Nothing is funnier than unhapppiness.” Both Grifasi and Chevannes, made up to appear comically ancient, act at the level that O’Reilly, Irwin and Thompson have set. (N. B.: Chevannes, seen only from the clavicles up, could be taken as a foreshadowing of the sand-dune-trapped Winnie of Beckett’s 1961 Happy Days.)
In this extremely well realized Endgame mounting, the only drawback – relatively minor but not entirely marginal – is that the Hamm-Clov back-and forth risks being repetitive in a way that the Vladimir-Estragon badinage somehow never is. Hamm can point out to Clov that “You’re on earth; there’s no cure for that,” but from time to time their exchanges lose the full weight of jarring declarations such as that one.
As for the monikers Hammer and Clov, it’s been noted that Hamm is a shortened version of hammer and that Clov is a version of the French word “chou,” meaning nail — in other words, two linked objects. But was Beckett also thinking of Hamm and Clov as ham and clove, cloves a common way of enhancing ham?
Is the sly playwright suggesting that often the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? In the end of this endgame is Beckett implying that Hamm and Clov are better off than they would be if separated? At fadeout is that what both characters are pondering? It’s a question this grade-A production might neatly be asking audience members to assess.
Endgame opened February 2, 2023, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through April 9. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
