I’m not a regular theatre goer, but this was an easy call. Beckett is a legendary writer, Simon McBurney is the legendary director of the Complicite Theatre Company, Mark Rylance is reputed to be one of the best actors in the world right now, and Tom Hickey and Miriam Margolyes are both stellar in their own right.
Though I must confess that the final clincher was the fact that the Goldmine’s own Victoria Gould was understudying Ms Margolyes. (Victoria reads the audio book version of the Screenwriting Goldmine, and I was hoping against hope that, in the nicest possible way, Ms Margolyes would be stuck in traffic and we would get to witness Victoria play Nell in the voice of the Goldmine.)
Whatever, with all that in place it had to be a nice entertaining night out, right?
As I’d read in the many enthusiastic reviews in the press, the performances were exceptional, and Rylance was staggeringly good. The staging was stark, and compelling, and Beckett’s writing was lethal as ever.
And yet. When the man next to me started thrashing around in his seat and groaning loudly I realised there was something wrong…
Half way through the play I became aware of a real split. The audience in general, mostly a collection of London middle classes, one or two other writers I vaguely knew, and the odd famous TV actor, were obviously deeply in love with what they were seeing. Much laughter, engagement, and full attention.
On my right the friend I went with was also clearly loving the show. Ditto with the laughter and engagement.
But on my left, a poor, unhappy man in a suit who must have wandered in after a day at the office. I bet he had been lured in by the fantastic reviews without knowing he was going to get an hour of high absurdist theatre, where non sense is the only sense that could be said to emerge.
His first groan came after half an hour or so. It made me jump; I thought I’d jogged his arm, or similar. But when the groans kept coming I understood. He hated the play. He hated everything about it, and everything it stood for, and how it was stealing one hundred irreplaceable minutes of his life.
By the end he was writhing in his chair, moaning, groaning, swearing under his breath at every heavy duty Beckett cadence, in an almost physical agony caused by what the people on stage were making him endure.
Me sitting in the middle like that made me wonder: Where was I?
Seeing a real legend performed so well in front of such a home audience is seductive. Because everyone around you, plus the last fifty years of history, tell you that this is a masterpiece, you tend to want to see it that way.
And yet.
Emperor’s New Clothes?
Did I actually, seriously, truthfully, engage with the play?
Did I actually get pleasure from the unfolding of the story, from the detail of the performances, from McBurney’s clowning, from the pathos of the ancient Nagg and Nell remembering their youth while consigned to their dustbins in the corner of the stage?
If I’m honest, no, I didn’t. Well, not much anyway.
If I’m honest, it was a bloody hard watch. If I’m honest, a lot of it felt like gibberish. If I’m really honest for most of the performance I was more with the guy on my left than with my friend on the right.
For most of the 100 minutes I just couldn’t understand what I was watching.
Word by word, line by line, riposte by riposte, Beckett writes like a genius – a bitter, acid, powerful genius at the peak of his game. Every single sentence rings true, sharp, aggressive, fearless, compressing salt and venom and thwarted hope and (just about) enduring love.
But beat by beat, scene by scene, what does it all add up to, other than a howl about wasted existence and the futility of living?
Is that it? Well, last night I couldn’t see any more than that.
So I came out of the theatre and was glad it was over and got the train home and forgot about it.
But then today I spent all day thinking about it.
And this evening I can’t get it out of my mind.
Now, just after midnight, I’ve started to believe that I really need to see it again, before the show closes this weekend. I’ve started to wish that I had somehow managed to film it, so I could watch it again, and again, and tear it apart, and watch it slowly, and rewind, and work out what all that absurdity was doing.
Because I’ve just realised that something amazing happened on stage last night, and I’m surprised to realise how I only received a tiny fraction of what was on offer to me.
Actually I don’t know why I’m surprised. That’s what great writing can do, and they did give Beckett the Nobel Prize after all.
I just wish I had gone in more prepared. I wish I hadn’t gone in with the mind set that you get after you’ve watched a lot of modern films, that it’s all going to be easy, that you’ll be spoon fed your entertainment, that the piece will have a moral and it will be underlined and mixed with sugar and fed to you in convenient pre-packaged chunks.
When you’re used to the simple facileness of most modern cinema Endgame is difficult. Difficult to watch, difficult to enjoy, and very, very difficult to ‘understand’.
And it’s all the better for that.
I think I’ll be seeing more theatre soon.
Check out Endgame for yourself with this affiliate link. This edition also contains the text to his most famous play Waiting For Godot:
How To Write A Screenplay