ENDGAME

Background Notes

by Soulpepper Associate Artist Toby Malone

For the first time in Soulpepper's history, an award-winning production is being re-imagined. Daniel Brooks directed a lauded production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame in 1999, which was the first Soulpepper effort to win the Dora for Best Production. Thirteen years on, Brooks returns with his original production team, along with original cast-member Diego Matamoros, to re-explore a play that has been rightly counted amongst Beckett's masterpieces. The play's debt to the game of chess is evident in its title, but the negotiation between the four disparate characters - Hamm, a man who cannot stand; Clov, a man who cannot sit; and Nell and Nagg, Hamm's legless parents who live in trash cans - is a masterful exploration of the game of life, where humans are forced to negotiate within themselves and must reach beyond to others in order to find succor. Often cited as an ideal example of the Theatre of the Absurd, Beckett's Endgame was, similarly to Waiting for Godot, first written in French before being translated by the author for its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1958. Endgame is perhaps the premier example of theatrical minimalism in the classical theatre: Beckett's world is nightmarish and spare, yet the concerns that the characters negotiate are quintessentially human. Fears of mortality, obsolescence, and isolation ravage each of the four figures, as they live variously in their reminiscences, their own discomfort, and in stunned anticipation of what is ahead. Much like Vladimir and Estragon breathlessly await the unknown in Waiting for Godot, so too do Hamm and Clov look ahead to a looming future that is never truly in focus.