‘POWERFUL’
‘MARK RYLANCE gives a mesmerising performance’
‘Mark Rylance’s earth-moving performance’
The Express
‘It is not easy to imagine a much better production of the play than this one’
Evening Standard
‘A brilliant complicite production of endgame’
‘simon mcburney ... is the greatest theatre-maker of his generation; MARK RYLANCE ... is the greatest actor
... Now they are together on stage at last’
‘RYLANCE’s fantastically funny and painful portrayal’
Independent
‘The incarcerated Nagg and Nell are superbly played by Tom Hickey and Miriam Margolyes’
The Guardian
‘A PURE DELIGHT’
‘SIMON MC BURNEY’S SUPERB PRODUCTION’
‘i haven’t seen a better production of the play than this’
‘that such a dark, unsparing play can leave its audience feeling so richly rewarded is one of the mysteries of great art’
Telegraph
‘sheer pleasure’
‘...thrillingly alive’
‘i have rarely enjoyed a night of baffling hopelessness so much’
The Times
‘Beckett’s despair is as bracing as ever’
Sunday Times
Sunday Express, The Times, Financial Times, The Express,
Evening Standard, Independent
‘DAZZLING’
Observer
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”, says the legless old woman Nell in Samuel Beckett’s apocalyptic play. It’s a perverse claim, typical of Beckett, yet in Complicite’s claustrophobic production unhappiness does provide comedy. A blind man, Hamm, squirms in a wheelchair. His servant, Clov, cannot sit down and staggers around the stage; we sense he would like to go elsewhere but is inextricably bound to his master. In two bins lurk Hamm’s parents, Nell and her similarly disabled husband Nagg. They and Clov are conventionally thought of as the three nails on which Hamm (a truncated hammer) crashes down. Yet the interdependence of Hamm and Clov is clear: they share their suffering, and so do we. In chess, the endgame begins when there are just a few pieces left on the board. Crucially, it does not have to result in a decisive conclusion, since stalemate is always a possibility. Beckett’s characters seem trapped in that condition. They inhabit a depleted world, tormented by memories of a better past where there were sugar plums and flourishes of greenery.
They return repeatedly to images of this past — Nell lapses into a reverie at the mere mention of “yesterday” — and the future seems unimaginable. In 1957 the Lord Chamberlain’s office refused the play a licence because Beckett would not amend a line about God: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” He eventually relented and changed “bastard” to “swine”. Here the offending word is restored.
This is as it should be, for Beckett is the most linguistically sensitive of writers, and amid the play’s remorseless asperity there’s poetry — given brilliant expression by director Simon McBurney, who imbues every blighted element of the drama with a flicker of humour.
Mark Rylance brings mercurial fury and a haunted bittersweetness to the role of Hamm. Seated throughout, he nonetheless gives a performance of kinetic intensity. His modulations are adroit, though occasionally a bit immodestly telegraphed. One moment he resembles a dyspeptic club bore, the next a forsaken manchild; he is a king, a seer and a Christ figure, but also a hysteric and a stingy little bully. Simon McBurney’s stiff-legged Clov recalls a primitive wind-up toy, at once downtrodden and energetically resentful, while Miriam Margolyes is a touching Nell.
The design, by Tim Hatley, is a masterpiece of bleakness. Two high windows are eyes letting light into the set’s skull-like chamber; its mean mouth is a swing door brilliantly contrived to squeak in two different ways.
Yet even as Beckett reduces the world to a dungeon where mankind totters towards its end, he seems to intimate that art is the richest verification of our being imaginatively alive.
Beckett described Endgame as “rather difficult and elliptical”. He wasn’t joking. Some, inevitably, will complain that next to nothing happens, or that it’s
too desolate.
Nevertheless, it is not easy to imagine a much better production of the play than this one.
Henry Hitching - Evening Standard
A bleak world that ought to depress but is a pure delight Endgame is the masterpiece that sorts out the men from the boys when it comes to admirers of the bleak dramatic world of Samuel Beckett.
Waiting for Godot, as the recent West End revival starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart proved, may depict two men stranded in a hostile Godless universe, but at least they have the consolation of companionship and a determination to keep on keeping on. Krapp’s Last Tape may present us with a dying man whose hopes have turned to ashes but it is also illuminated by a beautiful memory of love. And in Happy Days, Winnie somehow keeps smiling even when buried up to her neck.
In Endgame (1957), however, Beckett mercilessly excludes every possibility of the positive. The world outside is described as a zero, and while Beckett was doubtless considering the possibility of nuclear annihilation, his evocation of an arid planet now also reminds us of the possibility of a world laid waste by global warming. Inside the grim penumbral room where the play takes place, cruelty prevails.
The monstrous Hamm, blind, unable to walk, and slumped in a wing chair on wheels, mercilessly bullies the slave, Clov, who may also be his son. Meanwhile, Hamm’s old mother and father are kept in dustbins and fed dog biscuits. Both die in the course of the play. When a flea is discovered in Clov’s crotch it’s a matter for grave concern for it might eventually mutate into a human and perpetuate the misery of life on earth.
The effect ought to be terminally depressing, but somehow one emerges from Simon McBurney’s superb production feeling strangely braced, even cleansed. This is partly because we know that except in our darkest moments, most of our lives aren’t quite as terrible as those Beckett depicts. But it is also because of the clarity, courage, spare beauty and pitch black comedy of the writing in Endgame. Even in this vision of hell, Beckett makes us laugh, and gasp at his sheer courage in making art out of terminal despair.
I haven’t seen a better production of the play than this. Fresh from his triumph in Jerusalem, Mark Rylance has mutated from a wild rural hero into a bitter, emaciated sadist, who loves the sound of his own cruel voice but who somehow also makes us laugh at his extravagant actor-laddy diction and feel sorry for his distress.
McBurney combines the cowed with the comically laconic as Clov, alternately raging at and cowering from his master, while scuttling up and down tepladders with legs that seem to have lost the ability to bend at the knee. And Miriam Margolyes and Tom Hickey, clinging to the rims of their dustbins like chimps clutching the bars of their cage at the zoo, bring warmth and memories of marital happiness to the stage, as well as a grim reminder of the senility that awaits us.
That such a dark, unsparing play can leave its audience feeling so richly rewarded is one of the mysteries of great art.
Charles Spencer - THe Daily Telegraph