'Since that's the way we're playing it, let's play it that way'
Hamm's croon stands out of the current Complicité production. (H)ham(m)-ing over his arm-cum-wheelchair, Mark Rylance purrs it with clear relish; the audience laugh obediently. The actor gripes and gestures please, the audience laughs thank you. Gambit accepted.
In this neat exchange, where Actor and Audience cancel out (x-y= 0) we find perhaps the most literal extension of this production's simplification of the script's radical mathematics (where x≠ y, x/y --> ∞) .
Endgame is in many ways a play about playing, especially in considering its primary French incarnation as Fin de Partie. At its funniest - and most painful - it stares hard in the face of the worst-feared possibility: there is no end, no final whistle, but an irreducible fraction.
Yet in in Complicité's (highly reputed) hands, Beckett's explicit and meta-theatrical 'play'ing seems translated into a surprisingly safe play between playing styles. Beckett's piece treads a very fragile line: its entire enterprise is towards simplifying and balancing the equation formed by the bodies on stage. Yet the keynote is that we are not dealing with simple integers and equivalences: like Lear, reducing to zero is always-already impossible, because the component parts are not isolated figures but unstable fractions. We try to resolve, to reduce to zero, but if we ever land on such a reduction, we cease to represent the infinite and ceaseless truth. And Beckett stages the action of this: dying/living/acting-out, we call it many things. Theatre, in its repetitiousness, never wholly disappears, nor tangibly exists. Life too, in Endgame's parlance, is the same. (It is with this kind of deft dramatic achievement that Beckett has gained his reputation for speaking to al human existence - and perhaps now such glorification is sadly canonising him...the pat-on-the-back self-congratulation of the audience as well as the acting might suggest that. Has he become safe? Neutralised?)
Yet this uncomfortable tension is absent from WC2. Complicité does not work through with the play's attempts at balancing out, at solving that problem of reduction which plagues theatre and life: instead, it interprets, posits, a solution prior to the performance. And what we see is not the working-out, but the (reductive) solution, over and over. The play has lost its playing: it is just conclusion, in a series of stiff tableaux. Thus the discordant complementarity between Hamm (Mark Rylance) and Clov (Simon McBurney), is reified as a competition of two very different, though geo-historically intertwined acting techniques, which are thrust to the fore in the first fifteen minutes of almost-silent action.
Rylance's Hamm is Olivier, he is the English stage of the early twentieth century; he is the butt of Hamlet's actorly advice to "not saw the air too much with your hand". A good rendition of a very bad cocktail of Stanislavsky and speech lessons. Recalling, in his verbosity, B from Rough for Theatre 1 (though he is physically blind as A), he scatters half- stories ad inifinitum; he is the landowner, decaying bourgeosie - but more - he is the perpetually isolated blindman, gesticulationg in the dark and unable to sustain the act on his own.
Part parody, and almost all pastiche, Rylance's pandering to the Duchess audience rather than his on-stage cronies is again sympotamatic of a very modern, very British acting tendency which Tim Crouch's The Author scrutinised: that desperate need for unconditional approval. Such a need courses through Hamm as a character - but Hamm's audience is also Clov and the dustbins. It is no coincidence that - talented an actor as Rylance is - he stands for a very particular type of RSC-friendly conservative theatre. A theatre which can only play out, to its very quiet, very appreciative audience, as if they were behind a screen. (Which tonight, they are: a not-even-ironic fourth wall gauze slips down at the start and end of the performance!)
In this staged battle of opposites, Simon McBurney's Clov is stood to represent Complicité - and by proxy, much more than that. His jerky Clov, who cannot sit down and thus seesaws on his joints around a blind master who cannot stand up, is France, he is a line running through Artaud and Marceau to LeCoq, that also takes in the Russian and Eastern European influences of Meyerhold (and later Grotowski), he is a figure so desperately focused on the body that every line seems to arrive at his tongue already broken and crumpled. Speech seems not to fit him. It is instead reluctantly forced out in order to play the game.
And the two seem more like strangers. Like floating units. Complicité seems to have panicked and dropped the ball here, reading the piece as a concrete, barely-developing meditation...on what I cannot fathom. Isolation? The apocalypse? But this is done by crudely striking divisions and decisions through all of the key relationships in the play, as well as between audience and actors. As if these fixed binaries are the answer!
So Clov is all muscle, leg and torso; Hamm is all tongue, hand and throat. Such contrasts should be mindless/effortless, not foregrounded: because this play has been playing forever, it always will, the game is that there is no end.
Yet neither Hamm nor Clov seem used to each other - or tired of each other - enough to suggest that this endless rehearsal is second-nature to them. Perhaps because as yet, for the actors on stage, this performance is not second nature to them. (McBurney at times abandons - or alters - his hugely mannered walk, rendering its entire laborious construction ineffectual.)
Either way, the indifference between Rylance and McBurney is not that of Hamm and Clov's utter habit (and dependence). They seem unrelated: unrelatable. And this is indicative of the production's larger problem.
Complicité has not done its maths. None of Beckett's famous pairs can be carved up and given exclusive attributes: they are a mutual unity, the two play off each other and we must view even partially between the actors some verbal or imagined space where they play together.
This production's single-minded obsession with playing against means that another mathematical strain of Beckett's is reified and trivialised: the importance of Nag and Nell, the two stump(ed) parents of Hamm who live in dustbins at one side of the stage.
Hamm and Clov speak as if to themselves, individually. As such we do not get that sense of Nag and Nell having a private, quite beautiful though obsolete, irruptive energy of their own, which mingles and reconfigures what would otherwise have been a x=y, zero sum of a play. The intelligence and pathos of Beckett's text is that his characters cannot help but listen to each other, cannot help but respond. Here we feel that no such connection exists.
Thus the mutuality between the complementary pairs of Hamm/Clov and Nag/Nell are not allowed to mix and play, but instead, Miriam Margoyles and Tom Hickey do a tender job which is out of place in a production which would rather keep them under their lids.
And herein lies the problem: poor inversion on the director and actors' parts. Endgame is not simply a play about mutilation, but a mutilated play: it is a complex, fractious jigsaw that does not fit together.
For Endgame is dynamic, dramatic: it is no zero sum, no reducing to empty, no resistant little fractions that refuse to move away...yet to Complicité, it all seems to add up, and rest neatly behind the veil dropped over the scene at the start and end - an extra sfaety curtain as if we needed reminding who is in charge here: in this creaky proscenium, the fourth wall rules, x=y with no remainder, the arithmetic is absolute and Beckett belongs to the canon. Nothing more.
Hamm's croon stands out of the current Complicité production. (H)ham(m)-ing over his arm-cum-wheelchair, Mark Rylance purrs it with clear relish; the audience laugh obediently. The actor gripes and gestures please, the audience laughs thank you. Gambit accepted.
In this neat exchange, where Actor and Audience cancel out (x-y= 0) we find perhaps the most literal extension of this production's simplification of the script's radical mathematics (where x≠ y, x/y --> ∞) .
Endgame is in many ways a play about playing, especially in considering its primary French incarnation as Fin de Partie. At its funniest - and most painful - it stares hard in the face of the worst-feared possibility: there is no end, no final whistle, but an irreducible fraction.
Yet in in Complicité's (highly reputed) hands, Beckett's explicit and meta-theatrical 'play'ing seems translated into a surprisingly safe play between playing styles. Beckett's piece treads a very fragile line: its entire enterprise is towards simplifying and balancing the equation formed by the bodies on stage. Yet the keynote is that we are not dealing with simple integers and equivalences: like Lear, reducing to zero is always-already impossible, because the component parts are not isolated figures but unstable fractions. We try to resolve, to reduce to zero, but if we ever land on such a reduction, we cease to represent the infinite and ceaseless truth. And Beckett stages the action of this: dying/living/acting-out, we call it many things. Theatre, in its repetitiousness, never wholly disappears, nor tangibly exists. Life too, in Endgame's parlance, is the same. (It is with this kind of deft dramatic achievement that Beckett has gained his reputation for speaking to al human existence - and perhaps now such glorification is sadly canonising him...the pat-on-the-back self-congratulation of the audience as well as the acting might suggest that. Has he become safe? Neutralised?)
Yet this uncomfortable tension is absent from WC2. Complicité does not work through with the play's attempts at balancing out, at solving that problem of reduction which plagues theatre and life: instead, it interprets, posits, a solution prior to the performance. And what we see is not the working-out, but the (reductive) solution, over and over. The play has lost its playing: it is just conclusion, in a series of stiff tableaux. Thus the discordant complementarity between Hamm (Mark Rylance) and Clov (Simon McBurney), is reified as a competition of two very different, though geo-historically intertwined acting techniques, which are thrust to the fore in the first fifteen minutes of almost-silent action.
Rylance's Hamm is Olivier, he is the English stage of the early twentieth century; he is the butt of Hamlet's actorly advice to "not saw the air too much with your hand". A good rendition of a very bad cocktail of Stanislavsky and speech lessons. Recalling, in his verbosity, B from Rough for Theatre 1 (though he is physically blind as A), he scatters half- stories ad inifinitum; he is the landowner, decaying bourgeosie - but more - he is the perpetually isolated blindman, gesticulationg in the dark and unable to sustain the act on his own.
Part parody, and almost all pastiche, Rylance's pandering to the Duchess audience rather than his on-stage cronies is again sympotamatic of a very modern, very British acting tendency which Tim Crouch's The Author scrutinised: that desperate need for unconditional approval. Such a need courses through Hamm as a character - but Hamm's audience is also Clov and the dustbins. It is no coincidence that - talented an actor as Rylance is - he stands for a very particular type of RSC-friendly conservative theatre. A theatre which can only play out, to its very quiet, very appreciative audience, as if they were behind a screen. (Which tonight, they are: a not-even-ironic fourth wall gauze slips down at the start and end of the performance!)
In this staged battle of opposites, Simon McBurney's Clov is stood to represent Complicité - and by proxy, much more than that. His jerky Clov, who cannot sit down and thus seesaws on his joints around a blind master who cannot stand up, is France, he is a line running through Artaud and Marceau to LeCoq, that also takes in the Russian and Eastern European influences of Meyerhold (and later Grotowski), he is a figure so desperately focused on the body that every line seems to arrive at his tongue already broken and crumpled. Speech seems not to fit him. It is instead reluctantly forced out in order to play the game.
And the two seem more like strangers. Like floating units. Complicité seems to have panicked and dropped the ball here, reading the piece as a concrete, barely-developing meditation...on what I cannot fathom. Isolation? The apocalypse? But this is done by crudely striking divisions and decisions through all of the key relationships in the play, as well as between audience and actors. As if these fixed binaries are the answer!
So Clov is all muscle, leg and torso; Hamm is all tongue, hand and throat. Such contrasts should be mindless/effortless, not foregrounded: because this play has been playing forever, it always will, the game is that there is no end.
Yet neither Hamm nor Clov seem used to each other - or tired of each other - enough to suggest that this endless rehearsal is second-nature to them. Perhaps because as yet, for the actors on stage, this performance is not second nature to them. (McBurney at times abandons - or alters - his hugely mannered walk, rendering its entire laborious construction ineffectual.)
Either way, the indifference between Rylance and McBurney is not that of Hamm and Clov's utter habit (and dependence). They seem unrelated: unrelatable. And this is indicative of the production's larger problem.
Complicité has not done its maths. None of Beckett's famous pairs can be carved up and given exclusive attributes: they are a mutual unity, the two play off each other and we must view even partially between the actors some verbal or imagined space where they play together.
This production's single-minded obsession with playing against means that another mathematical strain of Beckett's is reified and trivialised: the importance of Nag and Nell, the two stump(ed) parents of Hamm who live in dustbins at one side of the stage.
Hamm and Clov speak as if to themselves, individually. As such we do not get that sense of Nag and Nell having a private, quite beautiful though obsolete, irruptive energy of their own, which mingles and reconfigures what would otherwise have been a x=y, zero sum of a play. The intelligence and pathos of Beckett's text is that his characters cannot help but listen to each other, cannot help but respond. Here we feel that no such connection exists.
Thus the mutuality between the complementary pairs of Hamm/Clov and Nag/Nell are not allowed to mix and play, but instead, Miriam Margoyles and Tom Hickey do a tender job which is out of place in a production which would rather keep them under their lids.
And herein lies the problem: poor inversion on the director and actors' parts. Endgame is not simply a play about mutilation, but a mutilated play: it is a complex, fractious jigsaw that does not fit together.
For Endgame is dynamic, dramatic: it is no zero sum, no reducing to empty, no resistant little fractions that refuse to move away...yet to Complicité, it all seems to add up, and rest neatly behind the veil dropped over the scene at the start and end - an extra sfaety curtain as if we needed reminding who is in charge here: in this creaky proscenium, the fourth wall rules, x=y with no remainder, the arithmetic is absolute and Beckett belongs to the canon. Nothing more.
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