Customer Reviews

Endgame and Act Without Words

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am no literary critic, but after reading Waiting for Godot, I sought more of his works. Beckett smashes everyday reality with a sledgehammer, wrecking the fantasy of social reality as we know it. The pointless circular conversations between Hamm and Clov are pathetic, useless, and point to the madness we engage in everyday, living in our own self created fantasies. We try to communicate with others , but in a sense we are only inflicting our own psychosis on each other, selfishly engaging in social ritual for some kind of perverse gratification. Of course this is only one take on life, only one way of viewing it. And like Elutheria and Godot, it is a dark vision. But to confront the deepest anxiety and emptiness within, a dark path is the only road to follow. Act Without Words is the first mime I have ever read. Seemingly simple, it also attempts to paint a picture of the futility and hoplessness of life, everything the mime reaches for he can never get, always tantilizingly out of reach. So with satisfaction and everything else in life it is always just over the horizon. Although others have interpreted this sense of need in other ways, sometimes more positively, Beckett shows it in an aweful light, leaving the reader with an empty yearning for something that can never be satisfied.

'endgame' is one of Beckett's most famous works, generally considered to be his theatrical masterpiece, as a master and servant fight it out at the end of the world in somebody's decaying head. Despite some very gallows humour, this is the Beckett aesthetic at its bleakest.

'Act Without Words' is very different. The philosophy may be familiar - man's struggles to survive in a world powered by unseen, malevolent, sadistic forces - but this is treated almost (self?) parodically. The play's main interest lies in its form. Throughout his career, Beckett has been paring down his language to the limits of concision - here he finally abandons it, giving us a mime more than a little influenced by the slapstick silent cinema that has always fuelled his work. I guess this is genuinely a case where you have to see it to appreciate it, but I had fun imagining proto-Beckett Buster Keaton in the role.

What the audience is met with is full-blown confusion. Thefirst scene opens with a brief tableau, a frozen frame depicting thetwo main character Clov and Hamm, the latter confined to a chair and the other dressed in shabby clothes, face expressionless, standing and looking into the audience. Beckett intends for the audience to be shocked and to be left unrestful. Beckett wrote Endgame to illustrate human suffering and the meaninglessness of routine. People who are not courageous enough to experience anything other than the monotony of life, people who lack any imagination and creativity. It is the extent of unfeelingness and total oblivion of emotions that detaches the characters in the play from what we may perceive as "realistic". On the first reading, one may be put off entirely by the repetitive questions and actions but with a closer second reading, the quality of Beckett's dramatic technique becomes palpable. Beckett's ingenuity of writing a play devoid of a plot shows that a dramamtist is not always bound to plot as most people assume. Anyway, here is a quote from the play to consider: "All life long the same questions, the same answers..........have you not have enough of this..this...this thing?"

In "King Lear" Shakespeare asked far more questions than he could answer, and by the end of the play little was resolved: unfit leaders would perpetuate the march of folly. Shakespeare's work followed many themes from "Oedipus" and both spoke to the ethos of their times. If any twentieth century play deserves to be considered the heir to "Oedipus" and "Lear" then Beckett's "Endgame" should rank right along with the other two. In Beckett's finest theatrical work, he places a blind man in Job's world, but in this case there is no answer from the heavens; instead Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell have to invent their own worlds, reconstructing the past and deconstructing themselves while Beckett himself reconstructs and deconstructs theater. One line best sums up the play and provides probably the best motto for the twentieth century: "the end is in the beginning and yet you go on." Many have seen this play as a dar! k Kafkaesque nighmare, but I see it as a true existential affirmation of what Camus saw as acting in good faith--choosing to play the game and go on with life even though there is little reason to play on.

A great follow up to Godot but a seperate entity in its own right, Endgame displays the quagmire of the wasteland more effectively than any other playright in the 20th century. This text, more than the previous piece, is laden with literary allusion as well. Fun for all, sarcasim intended.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame, A Play in One Act, Followed by Act Without Words, A Mime for One Player (Grove, 1958)

Samuel Beckett's plays are known for being obtuse while entertaining; Endgame is no different where this is concerned, but it is also arguably his most powerful work. We are presented with four characters, three of whom cannot move and one of whom cannot stop moving, in a relentlessly bleak landscape that, while it is never explicitly stated, seems to be post-apocalyptic. It is possible that these four are the last people left alive on earth, and their collective health is failing. Beckett uses this absurd, if gripping, mise en scene to reflect not only on both the banal and the dramatic in interpersonal relationships, but on how screwed up the world is in general. What caused these four people to be the last on Earth? And are they, in fact, the last on Earth in a literal sense, or is it just that they have become so isolated the rest of the world has forgotten about them? And can we (and the other characters) trust anything that Clov, the sole character capable of movement, is telling them? We get no answers; we are expected to supply them ourselves, of course.

Endgame is, in this volume, followed by Act Without Words, a behaviorist melodrama taken to absurd extremes, with one man in a desert setting unable to reach a carafe of water that is dangled (presumably, by a supreme being) just out of his reach, despite objects being delivered to him that should by rights help him reach it. As with most of Beckett's work (much of which, by the way, can be found free online at samuel-beckett.net, including the entire texts of these two plays), the comic and the tragic (or, I should say in this case, the endlessly frustrating) blend marvelously into one ugly morass of emotion. Great stuff, this. ****

Endgame is a beautiful example of why Samuel Beckett is hailed as one of the greatest playwrites of the 20th century. Beckett, one of the most profound exestentialists of all time is famous for not only his brilliant dialouge (so real and beautiful) but also for his amazing characters. Endgame is a perfect example of this.

If you are considering reading this play, or any other by Beckett, I suggest you prepare yourself. Do not expect Death of a Salesman here, because you are going to get the exact opposite. Without proper analyzation, Endgame appears to have no real meaning or plot so to speak. Baisically, it is about two men struggling to get along with each other, one whom had raised the other since birth. The entire one act play is based on their rising conflict with each other, and on the developement of both the major characters, Clov and Hamm. Although this may seem to you as not much to base a play on, the art of exestencialism is based on human emotion and existence. Therefore, it is the perfect place to describe a character in depth. If you are still having difficulty understanding the meaning of Endgame, analyze it as a feud between an aging father and a teenage son. The aging father yells and is tired of the teen, but still wants to hold him. The teen is tired of the father, but still listens to him until a certain line is crossed. That line will become clearer in Endgame by Samuell Beckett, a true masterpiece, which I highly recommend.

Beckett's second play "Endgame," translated from French by his own hand into English, is a vision of the world at its end. It focuses on the few surviving human beings who are themselves facing mortality; the betrayal they face from their own bodies as their physical forms break down and the end of life becomes imminent. I freely admit that I didn't understand everything Beckett was doing in the play, with fragmentation, repetition, extensive pauses within the dialogue, and allegorical referencing. I looked into educated sources on the play and found that there are allusions to the death of Christ and to Dante's "Inferno," which upon reflection become clearer to me now. I also recognized allusions of my own, particularly the parallels between the slave-son Clov and Prospero's savage servant Caliban: Clov's relationship to his father-owner Hamm is more forgiving and less vile than that between the two men in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," but the similarities are definitely there. Specifically, the line from Clov -- "I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others" -- harkens back to Prospero and his daughter Miranda giving the man-beast language and understanding.

Beyond the allusions are Beckett's own personal ideas about life and death, loneliness and family, powered by a fairly pessimistic and dark view of the ultimate fate of humanity and humankind. As a main player in the philosophical ideology and existentialist movement of The Theatre of the Absurd, his stance makes sense. The world within his play IS absurd, as well as meaningless and a bit inhumane. So, making sense out of non-sense is the key to the reading experience -- or, refusing to make the attempt to unravel the play in order to find some common understanding and just choosing to go with the flow of dialogue and action that is presented. I tried a little of both, which was frustrating and challenging while still being somewhat enjoyable.

The companion piece to "Endgame" is "Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player," which borrows motifs, characters, allegories and tone from its predecessor. While it might be much more effective and interesting if seen in performance, the actual reading of five pages filled with nothing but repetitive, tedious stage directions is less than a fulfilling experience. But the main event, "Endgame," is the reason for this book, and if you want a taste of that absurdist, existential playwriting that Beckett and Ionesco made famous, this and "Rhinocerous" are good places to start. And, of course, there's always "Waiting For Godot."

My graphics class had a choice between Godot and this to render the costumes for. I chose this one, with the idea that they were birds, and a keeper. Though seemingly obscure, the absurdities of the play made it work. This is an excellent read for anyone who likes a good absurdest play, and is willing to dig through some lengthy dialogue to get there.

A reader as myself would hesitate to review this play which requires the schollar. So, last having read existential philosphy 30 years ago, my impressions serve as my limited contribution. End Game qualifies as unique illustration of a manner of thinking, and as such I would agree this play powerfully contributes. What more dramatic way to illustrate hopelessness,purposelessness,and every deficiency than this play, the ultimate absurdity. In fact it is somewhat ridiculous to continue reading on after the first couple of pages. The content here is that we are without content, the epitome so to speak of meaninglessness. Is this some great drama? One would suspect many ordinary writers capable or more capable of the dramatic and written achievement, and so I have difficulty proclaiming excessive fame to this author on this play. End Game seems more an illustration or example than an great achievement; a progression (purgation?)rather than tour de force; a segue of philosophy to the stage, but falling short of quality I normally would subscribe to a great work of art.