THE ACCLAIMED London-based troupe The Godot Company arrive at the Town Hall Next week with a very special production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
Fronted by John Calder, Beckett’s principal publisher, the production also features veteran actor Henry Woolf - longtime friend and collaborator of Harold Pinter - who has also worked with some of the greatest actors of the 20th century including Laurence OlivIer and Orson Welles.
Endgame was Beckett’s favourite play in that it was the one he disliked least. While it has never achieved the same popularity as Waiting For Godot, it has as much poignancy, great speeches, and poetic intensity. This production brings out the humanity, humour, and the power of this extraordinary work.
The protagonists of the play are Hamm, an aged master who is blind and not able to stand up, and his servant Clov, who cannot sit down. They exist in a tiny house by the sea, although the dialogue suggests that there is nothing left outside - no sea, no sun, no clouds.
The two characters, mutually dependent, have been fighting for years and continue to do so as the play progresses. Clov always wants to leave but never seems to be able. Also present are Hamm’s legless parents Nagg and Nell, who live in rubbish bins upstage.
Grim and bleak and yet monstrously funny, Endgame is a play fraught with contradictions. Beckett himself felt that the most important sentence in the play is Nell’s “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” And he wanted the play to show “the fun of unhappiness”.
Accompanying the tour is the venerable John Calder, Beckett’s long-time publisher and close personal friend. Now in his eighties, Calder is as active as ever and remains a committed champion of Beckett and his work.
“He was a straight-forward man and in essence a simple one with an extraordinary mind,” Calder tells me. “As a writer he had the depth, the brilliance, and the poetic intensity of William Shakespeare, the other literary figure with whom he is most often associated. We can identify ourselves and our private thoughts with his characters, even though they are, on the surface, very different from the ways we see ourselves, and for the most part, very uncongenial.”
Calder’s association with Beckett began in 1955 when, having seen Waiting For Godot in London, the young publisher travelled to Paris to meet its author and the two men struck up an immediate and enduring friendship.
While the public image of Beckett might be a somewhat stern-faced forbidding individual, in private he was famously kind-hearted, as Calder describes.
“He once encountered two Irish labourers in Paris on holiday, not knowing where to go or what to do, to whom he gave the best evening of their lives at a good restaurant and then at a night club,” Calder says.
“He once handed all the money in his pocket to an Irish tourist who had been mugged and had not eaten since the previous day, whom he encountered when waiting for his passport to be renewed at the Consulate. Then Sam was unable to pay for it and had to walk home, not having enough to pay his bus fare.
“Such tales abound and all the considerable amounts that came with the Nobel Prize went to help others, often struggling writers and artists. He lived simply and a word that he used frequently in his last years was ‘Discard’ as he gave away possessions, manuscripts, and favourite old books.
“Knowing him was an extraordinary privilege. In spite of the bleakness of his view of the human condition, he has paradoxically convinced many that personal contentment can only come from unselfishness and helping others, that such virtue is not only its own reward but the key to living comfortably with oneself.”
Calder expresses the hope that this new production of Endgame will entice students and young playgoers along and perhaps act as AN introduction to Beckett’s work for them. Ahead of the play’s Town Hall performances, Calder will give a talk on Beckett at NUI, Galway.
Endgame is directed by Tony Rohr. The cast features Peter Pacey (Hamm ), Henry Woolf (Clov ), Colette Kelly (Nell ), and Royston Kean (Nagg ).
Endgame is at the Town Hall studio on Friday February 13 and Saturday 14 at 8.30pm. For tickets contact 091 - 569777.
