notes on endgame

Author:

• Samuel beckett, french, regarded as the most influential writers during the 20th century, 1905-1989
• Realism was very common during his time so he instead focused on the essence of human condition, wanting love/transcendence/escape/amusement
• Spent most of his adult life in paris, worked under James Joyce, big influence
• Started writing plays only after WW2, volunteered as an ambulance driver and then worked for a makeshift hospital in Saint-Lo, a city near normandy beaches
• First play, Waiting for Godot in 1948, about two men waiting for someone who never arrives, people didn't know how to receive it because it wasn't a traditional play but was still very captivating, and then became a classic
• Endgame is his favorite and considered to be his best, about a man who can't see or walk and a man who can see but can't sit. His experiences of caring for his dead brother/mother and WW2 are influences, and its’ reception was the same as Godot.
• “Everything [in Endgame] is based on analogy and repetition.”

Plot theme:

• Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell are four people living in a bare room where they look out at an apocalyptic landscape. Hamm is blind and cannot walk, Clov can’t sit, and Nagg/Nell live in little boxes like Oscar from Sesame Street except more depressed and existential.
• A mix of comedy/tragedy/despair/humanity, there isn’t really a plot but instead themes of the characters dealing with ‘Well there isn’t a world anymore so what do we do now?’ and also power dynamics between Hamm and his box-parents and Hamm and his son-servant guy.
• Also Clov seems to want to leave Hamm for dead since Hamm treats him like crap (and everyone else)

Theatre style:

• The Sumner is an arch theatre with a peculiar setup. The size of the stage allows the set to give off the feeling of an otherly world where our characters reside only within a tiny bunker in the unfamiliar place