Stephen Rea Clov as Clov. Charlie Drake Nagg as Nagg. Kate Binchy Nell as Nell. Tony Coe. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Generally accepted to be Beckett's bleakest play - indeed after it's English debut at the Royal Court, the TLS's Olivier Todd quipped that it made Waiting for Godot look like "a cheerful operetta". However, Beckett himself described it as "the favourite of my plays. This production is particularly notable as it is first full-length television performance of the play.
Add content advisory. Did you know Edit. Quotes Hamm : Accursed fornicator! Connections Version of Sluttspill User reviews 1 Review. Top review. Endgame OU version. Good also to see Charlie Drake in a 'serious' role, the first and only time I've seen him do serious acting, I think. And just as Dante's infernal images emphasize the eternal misery of its inhabitants, Beckett's characters are stuck in eternally static routines. They go through the "farce" of routine actions, as they call it, because there is nothing else to do while they wait for death.
Even the environment around them is static; everything outside is "zero," as Clov reports, and the light, too, is forever gray, stranded between light and dark. Beckett also makes use of repetitions to underscore the cyclical stasis in Endgame.
The play systematically repeats minute movements, from how many knocks Hamm makes on a wall and how many Nagg makes on Nell's ashbin to how many steps Clov takes. The repetitions prohibit the discernment of meaning, since there is never a final product to scrutinize. At the start of the play, Clov questions when individual grains become a "heap. When Hamm later considers how individual moments make up a life, the analogy should hold—it is an "impossible" life, consisting not of a life but of discrete moments, until death terminates it.
At one point, Hamm excitedly believes he is "beginning" to make some meaning out of the environment, but he will keep beginning to make sense of it and never finalize the meaning.
The constant tension in Endgame is whether Clov will leave Hamm or not. He threatens to and does sometimes, but he is never able to make a clean break. Likewise, Hamm continually tells Clov to leave him alone but pulls him back before an exit is possible.
Both wonder out loud why they stay with each other, but both men give reasons in long monologues for why they put up with each other: their empty lives are filled only with unyielding pain, and none of life's typical consolations help them—there is no cure for being on earth, as Hamm often says.
One of the unspoken themes in the play is that having someone else around, even an irritant, helps assuage that pain. Endgame by Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in ; his literary output of plays, novels, stories, and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame , originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is now considered by many critics to be his greatest single work.
A pinnacle of Beck Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in ; his literary output of plays, novels, stories, and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death. Get A Copy. Paperback , 60 pages. Published by Faber and Faber first published April 1st More Details Original Title. Nell , Hamm , Clov , Nagg.
Obie Nominee for Best Foreign Play Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Endgame , please sign up. How Beckett analyze his characters? See 1 question about Endgame…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details.
More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Endgame. Apr 28, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: drama , plays , 20th-century , france , classics , literature , culture , irish. It was originally written in French entitled: Fin de Partie ; Beckett himself translated it into English.
The play was first performed in a French-language production at the Royal Court Theater in London, opening on 3 April It is commonly considered, along with such works as Waiting for Godot, to be among Beckett's most important works. Characters: Hamm — unable to stand and blind.
Clov — Hamm's servant; unable to sit. Taken in by Hamm as a child. Nagg — Hamm's father; has no legs and lives in a dustbin. Nell — Hamm's mother; has no legs and lives in a dustbin next to Nagg. View all 4 comments. Apr 07, Hailey Hailey in Bookland rated it did not like it.
Oh well! Beckett wrote many strange plays, though sometimes the strange is needed to capture an aspect of reality that is, by its very nature, strange, mystical and untouchable. Good literature, the very best of literature, makes you think and makes you imagine. When you read you put your own design on the book. You interpret it. The answers are not given to you, you must find them if they are, indeed, wanting to be found.
Beckett gives you very little. I have some ideas about what the play may represent Beckett wrote many strange plays, though sometimes the strange is needed to capture an aspect of reality that is, by its very nature, strange, mystical and untouchable. I have some ideas about what the play may represent, but the point is it could resemble a great many things. It is not clear. It is like looking through a murky glass at an indifferent world that could be our own and not our own.
With the Endgame it is for you to decide. The ideas in his mind are better than the reality he faces. As such a sense of depression permeates the play, a certain dissatisfaction with everything that is existence. The world is not kind. It is not always good to use and at our end it leaves us dissatisfied and unfulfilled. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. They are incapable of moving forward so they are left to die in misery along with the values of the nineteenth century.
The two have no pulse and blither about bygone days nobody wants to hear about. Their fond memories are mere garbage to their son Hamm. He does not care about their lives or their past experiences because they are dead. The sea, the sky, the stars and the horizon do not differ.
Civilisation remains forever grey. There is no meaning to be found in any of it. Hamm and Clov will never represent something or be anything.
And to think differently is only a delusion. A cold detached death is what waits for them, again, a meaningless death against a multitude of souls that have littered the endless dark over the ages. CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! Brief laugh. Ah that's a good one! And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
As it progresses, it gets greyer with each line. The old world may be dead, though the new one is depressed and unhappy: it has no purpose. Final Thoughts Beckett would, however, read my decisions and probably tell me to throw myself into the sea. He knew exactly what he was doing, the comical genius bastard that he was.
Words do not get cleverer than his. View all 6 comments. Aug 15, Fergus rated it it was amazing. Hamm, as his name suggests, is a solipsistic, ham-fisted petty tyrant.
How many tyrants do you know who are ONLY that way with their families, but "rage, rage against the dying of the light" once they have once again to take up their crosses of meekness in the Real World? Probably quite a few.
I know I do. So Hamm, as Dante would possibly say, is among the proximate damned. But WHY proximate? Proximate, as being totally unaware of the evil within him; damned, as damningly evinced thus by his coward Hamm, as his name suggests, is a solipsistic, ham-fisted petty tyrant.
Proximate, as being totally unaware of the evil within him; damned, as damningly evinced thus by his cowardice in the face of his failing powers. Old Age ain't no place for sissies, Mae West said, and he is a selfish and solipsistic sissy. Being old for him is Pure Hell. The real thing, one bets, can't be too far.
Dante, I think, puts anger in a mediate circle of that place. But Beckett's Pozzo from Godot is probably freezing right now in the deucedly Satanic lowest chambers thereof. For he KNEW what he was doing, alright! Yet, look at Clov He's completely aware of his own just acts getting the right medication for his ingrate master Hamm at precisely the right time and would like to complain, but he knows nobody's listening, so doesn't - Cloves go with Ham, get it?
Clov's pains are Purgatorial. He's a conscious but sharp as cloves, and griping - and who doesn't complain, when you come right down to it? Think again. Dante, along with Descartes featured in his first young prose piece were his Vade Mecum's. His role models. They showed him the Real face of the Real world of Reason. I think, therefore I'm saved - through my awareness. Now, we all know Beckett had few life rafts. He played his life mostly by ear though carefully planned the volubility of his early prose to become utterly taciturn by his late works!
In other words, he took chances. But he was confident we are ultimately saved through our totalizing self-knowledge - And that guys like Hamm suffer even now for their ignorance, and deserve it - And that those facts, for him, were sufficient reason for whittling his own necessities, and his writing, down to their naked bare bones!
It is not generated by repetition itself, but by the repetition of repetition - the plethoric reiteration of it, as it were, that will lea 5 suffocating stars! It is not generated by repetition itself, but by the repetition of repetition - the plethoric reiteration of it, as it were, that will leave no doubt as to its inexorability. Beckett's theatre of the absurd is of singular value within High Modernism as we know it: its epiphanic qualities are keyed down to the point of dizzying annihilation, via the persistent theme of Waiting for something significant to happen that never does.
Whether we identify Beckett's literature as positing itself within an emergent philosophy of nihilism there is an abundant use of the word "zero" and existentialism, or choose to analyse his select words within the circumference of their creation, the one element of his writing that is indubitably palpable and ubiquitous is the exposition of meaningless as all-engulfing and traceable in every human phenomenon. In this we are reminded of Shakespearian futility: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Like with the vaguely platonic metaphor of "the impossible heap" it does not exist, but is merely constituted of single grains, therefore an idea that is not materially conceivable , life can only be grasped in its collection of moments. Linearity and rationality are here under assault, though seemingly as a matter of course, beyond human control. Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of. A pervading sense of senseless emanates from every word and concept, and their tireless yet tiring repetition; from the at times illogical word structures and use of ellipsis to denote hesitance, an attempt to retrieve meaning, and the ultimate observed emptiness within and without; the all-encompassing greyness, stillness, and the bare minimalistic set up.
But also, finally, the punctuated laughter itself, as a dialectic reference to the humour that lies within the pathetic the element of 'low comedy', the ridiculous in human nature. CLOV Mean something! Intimately connected with the void and voidness of existence is a lingering weariness that registers the impossibility of things. Stillness and motionlessness prevail, as does a sense of fatal aloneness , also developed through the exasperated co-dependency between protagonist Hamm and Clov.
One other aspect that makes Beckett's text magnetic is the extent to which it invites close reading and analysis. Elements of intertextuality , to Dante's Inferno especially, are implicit yet powerfully integrated within the logic of his text. Beckett's is certainly a bleak yet lucid vision of existence that questions incessantly though uselessly?
This was one intellectually engaging and intense read! View all 18 comments. Apr 04, Manny rated it it was ok Shelves: parody-homage , the-tragedy-of-chess , celebrity-death-match. Celebrity Death Match Special: Endgame versus Secrets of Pawnless Endings [An almost bare stage containing only an armchair, a table and two garbage cans. The armchair is covered in a heavy drape. CLOV enters right, carrying a bag, and limps slowly towards the table.
When he reaches it, he pulls out a chessboard and set. He places the board on the table and painstakingly arranges a few pieces on it, examining the position from different angles and adjusting the pieces accordingly. Finally, he mov Celebrity Death Match Special: Endgame versus Secrets of Pawnless Endings [An almost bare stage containing only an armchair, a table and two garbage cans.
Finally, he moves to the armchair and removes the drape, revealing HAMM, an elderly man wearing dark glasses. CLOV: I've set them up. We can continue. Rook and bishop against rook. HAMM: What do you mean? CLOV: It's an endgame, right? HAMM: You idiot! You don't understand anything, do you?
Samuel Beckett was a keen chessplayer. I can well believe he had this one in mind. HAMM: Moron! This is a universal metaphor for the human condition, not some piece of games trivia!
CLOV: Look. The position is theoretically drawn in almost all practical cases, but White can torture Black for 50 moves NAGG: [Poking head out of garbage can] 75 moves! CLOV: [Ignoring them] Personally, I favor Cochrane's method. Though the second rank defense also has many supporters.
0コメント