Endgame review – Beckett’s lonely clowns raise an extra laugh

This production by Flabbergast Theatre, which specialises in physical comedy, shows you what a good fit clowning is for Samuel Beckett’s work. The tragicomic characters in director Henry Maynard’s production are wretchedly grotesque. Hamm (Maynard), the master of this reduced and desolate world, or what remains of it, is recognisably bombastic, with flamboyant flourishes to his attire (an enormous hanky in his breast pocket, an ancient-looking rug on this knees). Clov (Simon Gleave) is his vaudevillian sidekick, with such exaggerated comic limps and gurns that you almost expect pratfalls. The tragic dustbin duo of Nagg (Derek Elwood) and Nell (Annabel Arden) are ash-faced yet upbeat.

Bombastic … Henry Maynard as Hamm in Endgame. Photograph: Michael Lynch

The relationship between the sad clowns holed up in their grimy space, just about surviving the postapocalyptic threat outside, leans into slapstick. It is amusing but lightens the material, undercutting the tragedy, although you certainly feel the sense of loneliness. But their respective ends are not emotionally searing, and neither is the production quite as threatening in its master-slave games.

Still, it illuminates certain aspects of the play through its exaggerations. One of these is the intolerable misery that creeps into the lives of these last remaining survivors in Beckett’s razed world. “I can’t be punished any more,” says Clov, at the start. “Can there be misery loftier than mine?” Hamm declares. But here it is clear that their survival comes through speech. “What is there to keep me here?” says Clov. “The dialogue,” replies Hamm. It’s true. Rather like Winnie in Happy Days, their stories stave off the terror of the outside and loneliness of the silence inside, at least for a while. The performances are pointed and everyone tells their strange or silly tales with vigour, so that storytelling itself becomes a reason for continued existence.

The set incorporates Clov’s kitchen rather than placing it offstage, while Hamm is classically positioned at the centre. The high windows on either side of him reveal a landscape too dangerous to traverse. Although descriptions are delivered straight, without reference to our world, Clov’s glimpses sound not unlike the endpoint of climate catastrophe. Given our current weather turbulence and raised temperatures, it chimes, alarmingly.