Setting the Stage for Endgame

What do Samuel Beckett’s stage directions “bare interior” and “grey light” bring to mind? Although his description for the set of Endgame is meticulous, designers and directors have created inventive environments for Beckett’s bleak sonata. Since its premiere as Fin de Partie at the Royal Court Theatre in London, Endgame has played out in a giant cage, a shallow lake, and a subway tunnel.

The playing space for the 1973 Manhattan Project’s production consisted of a metal floor and chicken wire. The wire trapped the players and put the spectators into four cube-shaped cages. Nagg and Nell squatted in a laundry hamper and a refrigerator box instead of Beckett’s “two ashbins.” Designed by Jerry Rojo, the set drew a mixed reaction from New York Times critic Walter Kerr, who argued that the wire, scrim, and glaring white light made it hard to see all the action. Otherwise, Kerr wrote that Rojo’s environment emphasized the author’s themes. What better way to highlight helplessness and despair than by imprisoning both actors and audience?

A decade later, Marcel Delval flooded the spacious Théâtre Varia in Brussels for his production. The first two rows of the theatre and the stage sat in one-and-a-half feet of water. The rest of the set included an enormous garbage bin for Nagg and Nell and a chair on a floating platform for Hamm. As Clov sloshed through the water, the actors’ voices bounced around the concrete walls; the randomly echoed syllables mocked their absurd conversation. Light and shadow cast eerie reflections on the rippling surface. Like Rojo’s cages, the stagnant pool accentuated the four characters’ captivity. Not only are they snared in a depressing room, they are also threatened by putrid water, slowly rising to engulf them. This design reinforced the play’s sense of damp, dark rot.

The set of Joanne Akalaitis’ 1984 production at the A.R.T. provoked a squabble between theatre and playwright. With designer Douglas Stein, Akalaitis created a bombed-out subway tunnel, littered with metal beams and charred subway cars. Although he did not attend the production, Beckett castigated the set as a distortion of his stage directions, and his publisher tried to get a legal injunction to stop the production. An out-of-court settlement required the A.R.T. to include a program insert. Beckett wrote a statement disavowing the production as a travesty of his play. Robert Brustein countered with a defense of artistic interpretation.

Some understood Akalaitis’ set to be New York after a nuclear holocaust, a situation that conjures both familiarity and distance: New York is a known place, while a post-nuclear world is an unknowable future. Suggesting no time period and no country, Beckett puts Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell in an abstract, absurd world without reason or escape. Zealots of following Beckett’s stage directions strictly maintain that placing Endgame in a recognizable city reduces its impact; they claim that by removing the action from a timeless space, Akalaitis stripped the play of its existential desolation.

Ironically, Akalaitis’ production proved textually more faithful than many incarnations that escaped Beckett’s wrath. During the Manhattan Project’s Endgame, for instance, director André Gregory had his actors embellish their lines with noises and songs. When Akalaitis rehearsed, on the other hand, she requested that her assistant director shout “pause” for each one indicated in the script to ensure that the actors observed the rhythms of the dialogue. Why Akalaitis’ setting incited more ire from Beckett than Gregory’s mucking about with the dialogue remains unclear.

For the A.R.T.’s upcoming production, designer Andromache Chalfant’s challenge was to create an original set that both serves the needs of Endgame’s imaginative director, Marcus Stern, and stays within Samuel Beckett’s parameters. What Stern finds most remarkable about the play is the vitality of Beckett’s language and characters, so he and Chalfant worked to make the human story more accessible within Beckett’s abstract framework. Rather than being hindered by the play’s requirements, Stern and Chalfant saw them as an exciting prospect, realizing that within great limits lie great possibilities.

Heidi Nelson is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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