Peter Viney's Blog

Endgame
Samuel Beckett
+
Rough For Theatre II
Samuel Beckett

Directed by Richard Jones
Set & costume Stewart Laing

The Old Vic
London
Thursday 20th February 2020, 19.30

ENDGAME CAST

Alan Cumming –  Hamm
Daniel Radcliffe – Clov
Jane Horrocks – Nell
Karl Johnson – Nagg

ROUGH FOR THEATRE II CAST
Alan Cumming – B
Daniel Radcliffe – A
Jackson Milner – C

The Old Vic, London

A very Beckett date … 20.02.2020. One of the puzzles about Michael Billington’s 101 Greatest Plays is the absence of Waiting for Godot though he explains why he skipped it and Endgame.  I saw at least three professional productions of Waiting for Godot and always enjoyed it.  In the days when we had to perform a rehearsed and acted reading of a real play once a month we did it twice a year. It was notable because Guy and Nick, playing Vladimir and Estragon, barely glanced at the scripts as both knew it so well. Karen played The Boy. I did lights and sound because we had discovered a box set of six DGG Avant Garde classical LPs in a sale and used little fragments here and there. That’s pretentious! said a friend. It’s Beckett, I replied. It’s supposed to be.

But … I had never seen Endgame. The Old Vic needed to add in another one act piece, because Endgame is too short, they say. At 85 minutes it was quite long enough for us. Most likely, as Endgame must be played without a break, they wanted the interval drinks sales.   Endgame was the play after Waiting for Godot and first performed (in French of course) in England (where else would you premier a play in French?)  in 1957. They’ve added Rough For Theatre II, which was said to be 1960, until a 1958 manuscript turned up- so it was very close in time to Endgame. It was published in 1976. In the Theatre bookshop near the Old Vic they had a mighty beefy edition of Beckett’s complete notes amendments and annotations to Endgame for £30. Some people must like this stuff a lot.

 Daniel Radcliffe as Clov.  Alan Cumming as Hamm,

The cast was our reason for booking. Alan Cummings has a range from sit com (The High Life) through serious Greek drama on stage (The Bacchae) to musical (Cabaret) to TV drama series, The Good Wife. We watched every episode of The Good Wife in which he plays Eli Gold, the arch manipulator behind a politician … hang on, like his namesake, Dominic Cumming(s). Then there’s Daniel Radcliffe, who must be one of the most famous faces on the planet. We never finished a Harry Potter film, but on stage he is as good as you get. Add Jane Horrocks from Absolutely Fabulous and Karl Johnson.

ROUGH FOR THEATRE II

Alan Cumming as B, Daniel Radcliffe as A

Very rough it was. Alan Cumming decided to really go for the Scottish accent, so that listening to him was like phoning Sky Digital help in Scotland where the embarrassment of saying ‘Can you repeat that?’ after every sentence leads you to give up and cancel your contract. James McAvoy and David Tennant have the same professional Scotsman affliction on chat shows, but fortunately not on stage nor on camera. Cumming is crystal clear RP in Endgame, but bizarrely barely intelligible in Rough for Theatre II. OK, do the accent, but just turn it down 50%. It’s called modification. Most people do it when speaking to someone who comes from a different accent region. It may be a case of Cilla Syndrome. Cilla Black took a career break to have kids between singing and her second incarnation as Lorralarfs Cilla on Blind Date. After years living in the south, she spoke ‘Stage Scouser’ – I was told this by Liverpudlians. It was an exaggerated Liverpool accent from twenty or thirty years earlier, not one of now. Cumming must have spent so much time in America and London. The Scots I know modify their accent when addressing Sassenachs.

Let’s face it, the piece itself is pretentious crap, and yes, I would have found it truly deeply meaningful when I was twenty-one. Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. It left me wondering why on Earth Beckett got a Nobel Prize. But I guess Bob Dylan did some truly dreadful albums too. His Nobel prize was not awarded for Saved or Christmas In The Heart.

If you want autistic dialogue, Magnus Mills masters the form in his novels (try The Restraint of Beasts), taking the Beckett template to a further conclusion. Cumming over-acted with gusto and Radcliffe had a very dull part. The best actor in it by a mile was C, played by Jackson Milner. All he does is stand motionless in the window for 25 minutes, but he does not even twitch when Radcliffe jumped up and around him. He had the best lines too. Oh, hang on, he didn’t have any lines. Well, that was better than the lines we heard from Radcliffe, not that it was fault. He hadn’t written them and he delivered with clarity. Cumming may well have delivered true gems under the accent, as he certainly looked lively enough, but who knows?

There was a lot of business with anglepoise lights going on and off, well executed by the lighting technician. It’s an old joke.  There was a bird in a cage apparently. It took me back to watching final year drama student productions, and indeed final year film school efforts. Yes, at that age it all makes sense. I used to love this sort of thing. Mostly it’s meat for Pseuds Corner in Private Eye. One star.

*

ENDGAME

I turned to The Samuel Beckett Reader for help on the characters in Endgame:

Less ambiguous than GODOT, more claustrophobic, and more direct, it has a fascination of its own. The situation is that of a hammer (Hamm) and three nails (Clov is French Clou, Nell is Nail and Nagg is German Nagel).
John Calder, A Samuel Beckett Reader, 1967

I would never have worked that out.

Cumming plays the blind invalid Hamm. Beckett spells Hamm with two M’s. After seeing this, I spell it with just the one. I can see why two great actors would be attracted to this, especially ignoring Beckett’s monotone staging instructions, and going for playing both parts BIG. Hamm is like a show-off audition piece. I’m so glad though that they ignored Beckett’s proposed metronome rhythms and acted it.

Clov is the servant played by Daniel Radcliffe. He has a great deal of physical business, and Radcliffe learned to limp so well doing The Cripple of Inishmaan. Years ago, we did a comedy video involving ladders, and Bob Spiers directing brought in a ‘ladder comedy specialist’ from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Radcliffe has been studying because he had a lot of comedy ladder business, all well executed. His frantic application of flea powder to his groin was excellent comedy too. He has a great comic talent, but I wonder if Beckett had intended so much physical comedy. I doubt it. Radcliffe sincerely wants to exercise his acting talent in theatre, but his previous playwrights, Martin McDonagh and Tom Stoppard, are a better path than Beckett.

While Radcliffe is all comic movement, Cumming appears paralyzed from the waist down and immobilizes himself for 85 minutes, but makes up for it with so much gesticulation from the waist up. I wondered if they were false legs and his were hidden in the chair at some points, but no. It’s brilliant performance as one would expect, but in pursuit of little worth pursuing.

The play was lit up by Karl Johnson and Jane Horrocks in their dustbins. Both captured that glum world weary Beckett mood in a way that the more frantic approach of both leads missed. It seems that Nagg is Hamm’s father, so Nell would be his mother, not that it’s mentioned. The line I remembered was Hamm’s agonized ‘Why did you engender me?’ with Nagg’s perfectly pitched and gloomy, ‘I didn’t know it was going to be you.’ Horrock’s expressions and delivery as Nell are a joy to watch. They were easily the best bit. That may be intrinsic to the text.

We both found it long, and like Quentin Letts’ two star review in The Sunday Times began to wonder if Beckett was sending up the audience with the lines in the play : ‘This is awful,’ ‘I’ve had enough,’ ‘How long is this going on?’ ‘This is deadly.’  ‘When is it going to end?’ I did notice how restless people were, moving around a lot in front of me, pressing into the back of my seat while moving around behind. It was to an unusual degree. It indicates something! It didn’t stop the audience applauding, but not a single stander. I always applaud very loudly anyway out of respect to the hard work of the actors.  Overall, my first thought was two stars. Over the years, I choose the same rating as Domenic Cavendish more than anyone else, but in this case he preferred Rough for Theatre II which I thought so bad. It’s a pity, but walking back to our hotel, we both agreed, ‘never book a Beckett again.’

However, The next night of our three days of theatre was Caryl Churchill’s A Number. After seeing that, a merely mediocre radio play, on a large stage, we both praised the theatricality of Endgame, and agreed Alan Cumming would stick firmly in our minds, and not only for those remarkable spindly legs. At least it had theatricality, so I will add a little.

** 1/2

THE THEATRE

We thought the loo signs were a joke. 14 CUBICLES one way, or 7 URINALS + 2 CUBICLES the other. I didn’t see any women in the urinals section. As they also had a separate single GENDER NEUTRAL LOO (so 4% of the loos in total, which seems adequate) it is hard to see the point, though maybe some Transgender people insist on going to a non-gender neutral loo. I was waiting for Karen, and in a theatre in an area as Woke as The Cut with the Old Vic and Young Vic, the conversation among the women going in ranged from perplexed through derisive to annoyed.  It’s daft. Well, it all fitted the play’s consciously pseud plot. At least at last they had enough loos. It also struck me that even at an advanced level in English, neither cubicles nor urinals are likely to be known words. This is why we use symbols not words.

THE PROGRAMME

Admired the layout and design greatly but there was no content worth reading. An essay on pausing in Beckett was fine, but not specific to this production,  a Beckett timeline, nothing in the Timeline on Roughs for a Theatre II though. Long lists of patrons, adverts, a theatre history that can go in every programme this year. Rehearsal photos. I don’t know why anyone wants rehearsal photos. A poor programme.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

4 star
Andrezej Lukowski, Time Out ****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ****
Paul Taylor, The Independent ****

3 star
Susannah Clapp, The Guardian ***
Natasha Sutton Williams, Culture Whisper. ***

The key to unlock Jones’ production lies with hard-core Beckett fans who have engaged with Endgame productions as Beckett intended. Jones has deliberately veered away from Beckett’s slow, flat, and metronomic performance directions (a metronome literally being used by Beckett to restrain his actors’ speech patterns and tone of voice). With that in mind, this production takes on a frisson and delight in breaking Beckett’s formal rules.

Tim Bano, The Stage ***

2 star
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph **

A relative rarity precedes this – Rough For Theatre II, in which Cumming and Radcliffe try less hard and acquit themselves far better as two officious otherworldly bureaucrats assessing a suicide case, who stands – frozen – on a window ledge while they sift through damning testimonies. It’s droll and illuminating. It gets the evening going but then, alas, Endgame proves a fatal non-starter.

Quentin Letts, Sunday Times **

This sort of theatre is a practical joke on pseuds … Absurdists will be in their element. Johnson and Horrocks in particular catch the canny comical pathos of Beckett. But how many of us really wantto sit through this sort of thing? It’s a cheap crack, I know, but when you hear lines such as “This is not much fun” and “Will this never finish?” and “This is deadly” , it is as if Beckett is baiting his audience.

Mark Shenton, London Theatre Co UK, **

While Beckett completists may appreciate the chance to see Rough for Theatre II, it’s a teasingly pointless sketch which runs for barely twenty minutes in which two bureaucrats sit at their desks beside an open window, from which a man is supposedly poised on the brink of throwing himself to death. There’s a lot of dry business with a malfunctioning desk lamp, but it hardly counts as dramatic action. A friend sitting in the top circle at the Old Vic texted me afterwards that it “made me want to throw myself off the Baylis circle.” At least it had the virtue of being short. Endgame, in which a grudging servant dances attendance on his blind, chair-bound master and his elderly parents, is four times longer and even more perplexing.

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

DANIEL RADCLIFFE
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard, Old Vic 2017
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, Grandage Season, 2013

ALAN CUMMING
Burlesque (film)

KARL JOHNSON
Hamlet, Benedict Cumberbatch, The Barbican (2015) ghost, gravedigger
Peterloo (film)