SAMUEL Beckett's second play, Endgame, was finished in July 1956. It was published in February 1957. The first production, in the hands of Roger Blin, was put on in the Studio des Champs-Elysées in May of that year.
The title of the play is a term used in chess to designate the third and final part of the game. This technical meaning is not recognized by most of the French. It was perhaps chosen for its indeterminateness, for its capacity to designate the end of many things, the end of life itself. The approach to "the end" is indeed the principal theme of all of Beckett's writings.
Two of the characters, Nagg and Nell, live in ash cans, the covers of which they raise from time to time in order to speak. But most of the dialogue is carried on between their son, Hamm, who is paralytic, blind, and confined to a wheelchair, and his male attendant, Clov. Even more than in the first play (Waiting for Godot), Beckett in Endgame indicates with great precision, as if he were writing a musical score, the pauses between speeches. This is unusual for the French style of acting. If observed in the performance of the play, the effect may well enhance the painfulness of waiting, the emptiness of existence, the expectancy of collapse, of a manifestation of total despair. The innumerable pauses between speeches when the stage is silent underscore the anguish in each of the four characters and the nudity of the words themselves when they are spoken.
Clov, throughout the action of Endgame, is constantly expressing a desire to leave. When Beckett was asked to summarize his new play, he stated that whereas in his first play, everyone expects the arrival of Godot, in the second play, they will be expecting the departure of Clov. He is terrorized by the thought of being left alone, of being the last man on the earth. This is a familiar fantasy of terror which most men have felt at some time or other in their existence, and which Beckett has succeeded in casting into the reality of the play.
This second play is totally different from the first, although it bears the unmistakable mark of Beckett's style and manner of thinking. Whereas Godot was concerned with the theme of waiting, Endgame is on the subject of leaving, on the necessity of reaching the door. We have the impression of watching the end of something, the end possibly of the human race. All movement has slowed down. Hamm is paralyzed and confined to his chair. Clov walks with difficulty. Nagg and Nell are legless and occupy little space in their ash cans. The setting vaguely resembles a womb and the ash cans are wombs within the womb. The two windows look out onto the sea and the earth, which are without trace of mankind. No affection joins the four characters. Nagg and Nell depend on Hamm for food. Clov, the son-slave, would kill Hamm if he knew the combination to the buffet where the last crackers are stored. Each has the remains of a kind of dream or aspiration that he tries vainly to communicate to the others. Nagg and Nell speak of a boat ride on Lake Como and the accident that made them culs-de-jatte. Hamm recites from time to time a literary story. Clov keeps referring to his departure, which he really knows is impossible.
This is the game that man constantly plays and in which he is always checkmated. The fundamental tragedy or hopelessness of the situation is offset by a fairly steady tone of burlesque and farce. The text is full of surprises and formulas that keep it moving ahead toward its conclusion. The metaphysical conclusion of the play -- and this is the same in Waiting for Godot -- belongs to each individual spectator who will interpret it in accord with his own sensitivity and his own philosophy. In Beckett's art the elements of time and of reason are rejected so that the playwright will be free to exploit the impotency of man. The drama is the lack of meaning which the spectacle of life provides and which is offered to the spectators seated in the theater although it may not be so comprehended by the characters in the plays. In the dialogue between Hamm and Clov, there is an inverted kind of desperate intellectualism. This becomes clearer to the spectators after they have left the theater and they are able on different levels to contemplate the mystery of life.
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