Endgame

The subtractive test finds almost nothing loose. Every property is brought on to be used up: the painkiller is asked for at intervals until there is none; the toy dog is made, set up, falls, and is at last thrown away; the gaff is fetched to move the chair; the alarm clock is wound against Clov’s leaving and hung on the wall to be watched. Repetition is the play’s matter, not its padding: the questions come round because the day comes round. What holds the axis a step from the top is small. Beckett tightened the text himself for his Berlin production of 1967, and Nagg’s tailor story runs on after its frame has landed, though its length is half the joke.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: dependence and cruelty are one bond, and ending, which both parties want, is the one thing the bond cannot perform. Hamm cannot let Clov go and Clov cannot go, and “Why this farce, day after day?” is asked by the man who keeps it running. The disclosure is moral as well as metaphysical. Hamm’s chronicle tells, in his own voice, of a man who came crawling to beg bread for his child and was refused; Mother Pegg died for want of oil Hamm would not give. A flea is hunted down because “humanity might start from there all over again”. Held below the top band because the condition is disclosed under extreme abstraction, the social particular present only as skeleton.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The elevation is cold and comic, and it comes in short charges. Nell’s “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” is a summit in one line, and the scene between the two bins, the failing attempt to kiss, the memory of a boat on Lake Como, rises to a strange tenderness inside the dustbins. Hamm’s “Can there be misery… loftier than mine?” is mock-sublime and sublime at once. The prayer, broken off with “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”, is the play’s funniest moment and its most dreadful. The close, Clov’s last speech and Hamm’s “Old stancher! … You… remain”, has real grandeur. Held here because the design flattens on purpose: long stretches are business made not to rise, and the height is never sustained.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The archetypes are built where the load falls. The room is the last refuge after a catastrophe, the shelter where the remnant of a species waits; master and servant are bound as king and man, father and adopted son, maker and made. The chess endgame of the title is structure, not allusion: Hamm, the immobile king who moves a square at a time, begins with “Me… to play” and plays out a lost position, “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing”. Around that frame older figures sound: Noah and his son Ham, Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended”, Richard III’s cry turned into “My kingdom for a nightman!”, the last words from the cross. Held a step down because these stay evoked: quotations, and a Noah frame offered rather than worked.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Measured against the drama it inherited, the departure is extreme: no action that changes the situation, no outside world shown, a stage that is also a skull with two eyes, and characters who know they are in a theatre, Hamm commenting on his own story as technique and on his last soliloquy as a turn still to come. The stake was real: a play in French by an Irish novelist, its first performance given in French in London. Held below the top by an inheritance from its own author. En attendant Godot (1953) had already made the decisive turn, and Fin de partie deepens and darkens it rather than making a second of equal size: the more radical of the two in closure and in cruelty, the less radical in being first.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The play is a game in a closed room, and what it knows is that ending is a move the game can approach and not make: “Something is taking its course”, and the course is the form itself. The opening, “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”, states the whole structure as a grammar of approach without arrival, and the close returns the handkerchief to Hamm’s face, so that the last image is the first. The stage is the instrument: the ladder to the two windows, the chair wheeled to the exact centre, the bins at the edge. Prose, which Beckett had just used for the trilogy, could tell of the room; only theatre makes an audience sit in it for its length and wait for the end with Hamm.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence rather than promise. Theodor Adorno’s essay “Trying to Understand Endgame” (1961) read the play as the liquidation of the subject after catastrophe; Stanley Cavell’s “Ending the Waiting Game” read it through the ordinary language of its exchanges and found theology there; Hugh Kenner read it as chess and as theatre about theatre. Productions have played it as post-nuclear, as domestic, as music hall. None has closed it. The play yields formally on return as well: the doublings (two windows, two bins, two parents with their two memories), the day that is every day, and the pairing of the opening and closing speeches reward the tenth reading as they reward the first. A play of this compression carrying this much interpretation, and surviving every manner of staging laid on it, has shown its depth rather than suggested it.

Score: 9.2 / 10

A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The field is European drama after 1945. The force is high: the play takes the theatre of waiting its author had made and drives it to a form without even the hope of an arrival; it reorganises what a stage can hold as the unit of a play, a room, a body, a game; and it makes the theatre’s own conventions a subject. Held here because the reach is shared with Godot, which carries most of the credit for the turn of the 1950s; Endgame is the play that proved the turn was not a single success. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pinter’s rooms and servants, Thomas Bernhard’s tyrannical invalids and their attendants, the later stage of Sarah Kane and much European director’s theatre are hard to conceive without it, and it is taught and played as one of the two central plays of the postwar stage.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over sixty-nine years since the première of 1957, with no discount for age and no credit for time not yet elapsed. Presence has been wide and continuous: the play has been staged in every decade since, in many languages, by major companies and by small ones, and it is read and taught in both of its languages. What makes the work survives whole, in two authorial texts, with a later revision by its author for performance. Nothing in its surface is fixed to its moment; the reading of it as the aftermath of a particular catastrophe belongs to its readers, not to the text. Held a tenth below the widest presence because its life on the stage, though continuous, is narrower than Godot’s and leans more on the academy.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged on the English, with the French beside it. Command of the medium at the highest level, and load-bearing. The dialogue is built in short exchanges whose rhythm is musical, the written pause a measured unit of the line. The comic timing is music-hall exact: Hamm’s centring of the chair and Clov’s ladder routine can be played as pure clowning. Hamm’s long speeches, the chronicle above all, move among three registers, the storyteller’s, the commentator’s on his own story, and the man’s in the chair, with total control. The making in two languages counts here: Beckett remade the play in English rather than translating it, keeping its moves and finding English music for them: “Mean something! You and I, mean something!” Held below the very top only because some of the business is prescribed so exactly that part of its craft lies with the performer.

Score: 9.4 / 10

One physics governs the whole. Take the two furthest elements: Nagg’s music-hall story of the tailor, told for laughs, and Hamm’s chronicle of the begging father, told for damnation. They obey one law. Both are stories told in the shelter to fill the time before the end; both concern a making and its failure, a world against a pair of trousers, a man and a child; both are interrupted and judged by their listeners. The world outside agrees with the dwindling stores within: grey from the window, zero on the thermometer, a sea without gulls, an earth where “There’s no more nature”, and inside, biscuits, painkiller, bicycle wheels and coffins running out. The range runs from slapstick to theology. The one strain is the boy Clov sees at the end, an opening on life outside that the law permits but does not wholly explain.

Score: 9.3 / 10

For a short play in one room the orders held are many and integrated: a family across three generations, parents, son and adopted son; labour and servitude, in Clov’s work, his hatred of it and his obedience; the natural order and its exhaustion; the sacred, in the prayer and the echoes of the Passion; history as catastrophe without a name; the making of art, in Hamm’s chronicle and his performance of it; and consciousness itself. Each presses on the others inside one situation. What holds the axis here is that every order is held as a skeleton, by design: the state is absent, the social world is one household reduced to its bones, and history appears only as aftermath. The figure describes what the play holds, not its length: more than most single poems or stories, less than the great novels or the history plays.

Score: 7.9 / 10