“Endgame” – An Examination of Ordinariness Triumphs Over Apathy

It was with a heavy conscience that I visited Kevin Flynn’s “Venue” on Tuesday night where Sligo Drama Circle members staged Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”. This summer the Circle have given Sligo audiences two other works, “The Tailor and Ansty” and “Letters of a Matchmaker”, both of which deserved reviews in this column. Such enterprise is deserving of recognition in any paper which associates itself with the locality – the only excuse I can offer is that duties at the Journal’s Ballina Head Office are, these times, curtailing my nights in home territory. The Drama Circle’s production of “Endgame” deserves to be seen by more people. On the Tuesday night a little over fifty people were present – a situation which an insult to Beckett’s genius and the efforts of Sligo Drama Circle as well as an indictment against those who weren’t there.

It is a complex awesome work and even though “Endgame” has only four characters, two of them with minor roles, it never became boring during its eighty minutes. Some critics consider Beckett the most important playwright of the twentieth century; others are less kind. The production at the Venue would help one to understand why such divers opinions exist. The play itself has similarities with another of Beckett’s works “Waiting for Godot”; the impatience of the conversation between Clov and Hamm, the absurdity of much of their normal behaviour, the patterns and twists of the games they play as Hamm’s end approaches are typical Beckett. So, too, was the scantily clad setting. It all put one in mind of one critic’s comment: “Never was the movement towards silence so talkatively expressed”. In Beckett’s often there is an examination of ordinariness. Even in such a basically sad work as “Endgame” he managed to weave much humour into the work. Maybe that’s not surprising really – Beckett, who spent much of his own schooldays in nearby Enniskillen, actually met his wife after he had been stabbed in a street.

The Drama Circle’s production was technically very efficient with none of the actors getting in the way of the characters they represented. Lighting and props (apart from the alarm clock which didn’t work) and stage design were adequate with sensible rather than outrageously adventurous production and direction. Among those in attendance at the Tuesday production were the daughter and grand-daughter of the famous German playwright an poet Bertold Brecht, a literary giant. He it was who once wrote: “I carry a brick on my shoulder so that everyone will know what my house looks like”. And to think that on the same night that Brecht’s family were among an attendance of fifty people at a Beckett play in Sligo, almost 1,000 people queued to see Makem and Clancy a few hundred yards away …….

One looks forward to more drama at “The Venue” and to better recognition of the Drama Circle’s endeavour.

from The Western Journal, September 5th, 1980