Endgame
Why Beckett? | Photos | Interviews | Design | Explore Beckett | Artist Bios

Why Beckett?

“This is the source of inner cleansing, the life force nevertheless, in Beckett's pessimism. It houses a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs further into the depths of abhorrence, a despair that has to reach the utmost bounds of suffering to discover that compassion has no bounds.”
-Karl Ragnar Glerow, of the Swedish Academy, presenting Beckett the Nobel Prize for Literature

“A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.”
-T.S. Eliot

From Artistic Director Rob Melrose:

Talking about Beckett’s work is difficult. Beckett himself found it difficult. But why? It is because Beckett took great pains to make his plays first and foremost an experience. It is something that can be looked at from many angles and each audience member is invited to have his or her own personal reaction to it. There is no message. There is nothing to “get.” His work is mysterious and paradoxical by design. This is why Beckett was evasive with his critics who wanted to have his plays explained to them. He didn’t want his plays reduced to one thing, but rather to be many things, as varied as life itself. Beckett said it best when defending Finnegans Wake, the masterwork of his mentor James Joyce, “His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.”

It is in this spirit that I invite you to see The Cutting Ball Theater’s production of the play Beckett valued most in his oeuvre, Endgame. As you embark of this adventure, you may want to go solo or you may prefer to have a guide.

If you would like to go solo and read our program notes later, click here to buy tickets now.
If you would like a guide to our production, scroll down for our program notes.
I hope to see you at the theater!

-Rob Melrose, Artistic Director and director of Endgame

Our production: Making the Strange Familiar

Last Spring Joe Dowling, artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, talked with me about directing Beckett’s Happy Days at the Guthrie.  This prompted me to re-read all of Beckett’s plays and to read his novels and biography for the first time.  I directed Endgame in 1994 when I was the artistic director of the Yale Summer Cabaret.  Back then I was in love with surrealism and immediately latched onto the absurdist aspects of Endgame. In the end, I created a very abstract production of the play.  My recent reading of Beckett’s novels, with their rich detail and poignant situations, completely changed the way I saw Endgame.  After reading his biography I found that Beckett once worked in a mental institution which later became the basis for his novel, Murphy. This information made me realize that all of Beckett’s work, absurd as it can be, is rooted in actual human experience.

Thirteen years ago, I felt like my job was to take Beckett’s absurd writing and give it an absurd production. Now, I feel my goal is to root Beckett’s language in a reality as solid as the ones that exist in his novels.  Brecht said, “the artist’s job is to either make the familiar strange or the strange familiar.”  Taking up this mantle, my goal with this production is to make the strange familiar.

Set and Costume Designer Fred Kinney and I are working hard to be faithful to the very letter of Beckett’s stage directions. The play will take place in “a bare interior” as Beckett specifies and not a subway station, a forest or on the moon. Our bare interior, however, will be an interior that is familiar, an interior our audience has seen before. Fred and I toured San Francisco in December and looked at old, run down Victorian houses for our research. Similarly the characters will be people from our world, maybe people we pass by everyday on the street.

The more I get to know Beckett, the more I lose the stereotype of this cold, ancient avant-garde author and gain the sense of this empathic, kind, and deeply human man. He had a deep admiration and sympathy for mankind despite its troubling predicament of life on earth.

What is Endgame about? It is the thing itself!

In Endgame like its predecessor Waiting for Godot, there are two couples. There is an older couple Nell and Nagg who seem to cooperate and a younger couple Hamm and Clov who have more of a master servant relationship. In all, there are three generations represented: first: Nagg and Nell; second: Hamm; and third: Clov. Clov can walk, Hamm is confined to a wheelchair and Nagg and Nell are confined to garbage cans.

But who are Hamm and Clov? Is Hamm the hammer and are the others all nails: Clov (from the French: clou), Nagg (from the German: Nagel), and Nell (from the English: nail)? Is Hamm a ham actor? Is he an older Hamlet or perhaps a King Lear with his fool? Are Hamm and Clov master and servant? Father and son? Is Hamm a roast ham with a clove stuck to him? How did Clov get here? Hamm tells a story about a man taking a small boy into his service. Is this boy Clov? Later on another small boy is seen out the window. Is this a new boy to take Clov’s place? Or is this boy represent a fourth generation and he will become Clov’s servant when Clov himself takes Hamm’s place in the wheelchair? These are all ambiguities that resonate throughout the play and have intrigued audiences for half a century.

While respecting these ambiguities, our production seeks to explore the nature of this relationship. This summer, director Robert Woodruff spoke at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival about his work. He showed a scene from his stunning production of Medea and said that when one asks real questions of myths, that’s when the work starts to get interesting. Looking at Medea as a real woman who makes the painful choice to kill her children is infinitely more compelling than simply acting out an ancient myth. With our production of Endgame, I took a page from Robert’s playbook and stopped seeing Hamm and Clov as abstract absurdist characters and started to explore them as real people in a real relationship. And indeed, that’s when the work got interesting…

Click Here for Tickets!