ARTicles vol. 7 i. 3: Beckett, Endgame, Mortality, and Laughter

“The trouble with tragedy,” Samuel Beckett groused, “is the fuss it makes about life and death and other tuppenny aches.” Endgame is a funny play. From Wilde and Shaw through Synge and O’Casey to Beckett and McDonagh, Irish playwrights wring laughter from pain, a lesson learned from the savage wit of Dublin’s Jonathan Swift. Irish playwrights make the world laugh, but the laughter comes from sorrow.

Hugh Kenner dubbed Beckett a “stoic comedian.” So how does a stoic comedian write a funny play about the end of the world? By turning “tuppenny aches” into vaudeville shtick, or to be more precise, Irish music hall. These variety entertainments, popular in Beckett’s youth, included singers, acrobats, and comics. Music hall comedians – often a straight man and sidekick in a master-man relationship – told jokes and stories, performed slapstick, and engaged in cross-talk – rapid, nonsense patter. In Endgame, this master-servant duo becomes Hamm and Clov, an absurd couple who pass the time telling stories, exchanging digs, and fumbling with props.

Endgame is rich with the physical comedy of music hall. Clov exits and enters constantly to retrieve ladders, telescopes, and toy dogs. Hamm shrieks about the positioning of his chair: “Is that my place?…Am I right in the center?…Put me right in the center!” Nagg and Nell pop out of trash cans and, sexually deprived, strain to kiss each other. Clov dumps powder down his pants to kill a flea.

Beckett also revels in the verbal comedy of music hall. Even the names of his main characters are a joke: Hamm is the raconteur who “hams” up his stories, and everyone knows you can’t serve ham without clove. A bickering father-and-son duo, Hamm and Nagg delight in music hall storytelling. Hamm tells an ever-evolving story of Christmas past, punctuated by his own critique: “Nicely put, that,” “A bit feeble, that.” Nagg tells a joke about the tailor who takes three months to make one pair of pants. Clov and Hamm, the music hall straight man and sidekick, engage in bizarre cross-talk concerning the weather, Hamm’s story, and their health while dishing out gags that mock the conventions of the theatre – “What is there to keep me here?” “The dialogue.” Confronted with the absurdity of their situation, Beckett’s characters clown around, waiting for the end of the game: death.

Beckett’s genius lay in fusing existential themes with music hall comedy. The Theatre of the Absurd was born from the ashes of World War II. The playwrights of the Absurd saw the collapse of the world they had known: within six years, 72 million people had been killed, Europe lay in ruins, and the atom bomb announced doomsday. Theodor Adorno writes, “After the Second World War, everything…was destroyed, even the survivors cannot survive.” The result of this catastrophe, writes George Steiner, is the death of tragedy: “Compared with the realities of war and oppression that surround us, the gravest imaginings of the poets are diminished to a scale of private or artificial terror.”

Beckett’s work after World War II bears the mark of his experience in the French Resistance. For two years, Beckett translated and compiled intercepted messages before his cell was betrayed to the Germans. He escaped to Rousillon in the south of France, where he lived in exile for three years. During that time he resumed his clandestine activity by setting up contacts between Resistance workers and picking up, hiding, and delivering ammunition for the destruction of railroad lines. Beckett carried out most of this work at night, which meant he spent his days waiting in uncertain safety, vacillating between boredom and anxiety – feelings that permeate both Endgame and Waiting for Godot.

Beckett returned from Rousillon in 1945, and over the next decade he, along with playwrights Ionesco and Genet, began to explore the world the War had created. Looking back on their work, Martin Esslin coined the term “Theatre of the Absurd” and defined it as a movement that “strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational.” Playwrights of the Absurd did not write plays that simply ruminate on the irrational; their plays embody it.

Endgame perfects this unity of form and content: four survivors of an unknown catastrophe – a man who can’t sit down, a man who can’t stand up, and two amputees in trash cans – perform an endless cycle of meaningless rituals as they await the end.

Although staring into the void may sound bleak, the writers of the Absurd always saw their world with a dark sense of humor. Of the senselessness of life, Ionesco wrote, “The unendurable admits of no solution, and only the unendurable is profoundly tragic, profoundly comic and essentially theatrical.”

Beckett too sees the world through the bifocals of tragicomedy: in his novel Watt he writes, “The mirthless laugh…is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word, the laugh that laughs – silence please – at that which is unhappy.” In his dramatic works, Beckett pursued this “pure laughter”; writing to a friend, he spoke of “somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word through words.” Music hall had shown Beckett the way; he infuses his comic quartet with the energy of farce. In the midst of gloom, his characters are irrepressible.

Given the physicality and timing Beckett requires, stand-up comedians and comic actors have taken to his plays. In the original, French production of Waiting for Godot, cabaret comedian Lucien Raimbourg took the role of Vladimir; in the first American version, Bert Lahr played Estragon; and Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane have been announced as the next Didi and Gogo on Broadway.

With this tradition, it’s only fitting that Will LeBow, Tommy Derrah, Remo Airaldi, and Karen MacDonald – four brilliant comic actors – should tackle it. LeBow, who started his career in the comic theatre, and Derrah, lauded by Robert Brustein for his “flair for cranky fulminations,” take on Hamm and Clov. Airaldi, whose gift for physical comedy enthralled audiences in last summer’s Cardenio, and MacDonald, who began her career in the musical and improvisational theatre, will climb into trash bins to play Nagg and Nell.

Despite its place as a masterpiece of Theatre of the Absurd and arguably Beckett’s greatest play, Endgame remains a rarely-produced classic. With a cast of ferocious comic talent under the direction of Marcus Stern, a new generation will experience the tragedy and, yes, comedy of Beckett’s play. Confronted with tragedy, Hamm asks, “Don’t we laugh?”

Whitney Eggers is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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