End Game - Three River Theatre

Endgame, Nobel Prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett’s (1906-1989) favorite play, is a tragicomedy of epic proportions. Written in a macabre intensity of mood, it represents the playwright’s fierce declaration of oblivion in a world populated with its last survivors. The play, about the end of everything, moves inexorably to its own conclusion, with its own humor bursting out of the bounds of Beckett’s dark account of the Earth’s last whimper.

Hamm is a blind tyrant, unable to stand. Clov is his son, unable to sit. Hamm’s parents, Nell and Nagg, are living in bins.

Sheltering in an underground room, Hamm orders Clov about. Clov looks out the window for signs of life, but all seems lost and there is no one there. Inside, the characters pass the time, brutally toying with each other in the way only family can. These four people, perhaps the last, are playing out the game of life to its inevitable end.

In the mix of dark comedic repartee and distilled insight, Beckett’s singular voice rings clear – absurdity in the face of meaninglessness, sorrow in the face of futility, humour in the face of mortality. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” invokes Nell, which summarizes the tragicomic nature of this timeless play.