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Beckett’s Endgame at the Old Vic Successfully Captures the Yearning for the Sweet Release of Death

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It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Endgame by Samuel Beckett, playing a double bill with his short piece Rough for Theatre II, now at the Old Vic if you like torture.

To sort something straight off the bat: this is NOT about the last Avengers movie (which, amazingly enough, I still have not seen. I really do not care anymore about those superheroes. It’s too much). Endgame is a famous play by Samuel Beckett, the playwright of ‘theatre of the absurd’, famed for his dreary, bleak look at the human existence. He did not seem happy. People say his work is ‘tragi-comic’ but I did not get the comic part. He famously said that nothing is funnier than unhappiness…which after seeing this production, I promise you is false: I was very unhappy, and very much not amused. I have never been so close to being sure that a piece of theatre was pranking me as I was during this evening at the Old Vic, nearly shouting “oh THIS is the bad place” despite the beloved talent onstage (Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming). I’ve also never seen so many people walk out of a show, unable to wait till an interval or the end, and I’ve seen some shit.

Let’s start with Rough for Theatre II, since it’s a little nothing of a show. This production serves a double bill with Beckett’s little one-act that’s about two like, afterlife accountants but not in the brilliant Good Place way, who show up when someone is about to commit suicide and they go through his life and see whether he should or not? At least I think that’s what it’s about. It was odd and vague and incredibly short. Daniel Radcliffe gets to do a lot of box jumps which is fun for him but not for me when watching because I was like I wanna do box jumps instead of watch this. I honestly have to give Beckett props for naming it what it is.

Endgame, the main course, is one of the most unreasonable pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Remember how Alex Borstein did that episode of Friends where she had a one-woman show about why men don’t like her and talked about getting her first period, and Chandler made everyone go see it as punishment? I didn’t know Sammy Beckett but I feel like he really hated theatergoers. He’s the playwright equivalent of Lewis Black’s joke about how airplane seats in economy were created by a guy with scoliosis who is really f-ing pissed. This piece is about an invalid (Alan) and his servant (Daniel) and Alan is mean to Daniel and Daniel has a limp but Alan can’t walk or stand at all and they just are like, waiting for death? It’s considered a sort of sequel to Waiting for Godot and I guess they just replaced Godot with Death. Alan’s parents live in trashcans at the foot of the stage and sometimes they pop up and say nonsense things that are weird and not funny and he replies in ways that are absurd because I guess this is Theatre of the Absurd but just because it has an official title doesn’t make it worthwhile.

Daniel is fine, but there’s only so much you can do performance-wise with the material you are given, especially when most of your requirements are carrying a ladder to and fro and climbing up and shimmying down, over and over and over in an act that serves no purpose except to delight people who find delight in incongruous slapstick, a cheap laugh ploy that, of course, works because people love cheap laughs that don’t have anything to do with anything. Alan Cumming is fine, though overly hammy much of the time. But I don’t know what we can ask of them when they are forced to do this absolute nonsense show. Why, why is this considered a great piece of theatre? The only thing I can think of is, it’s about people waiting for the sweet release of death and when you watch it, it’s such torture that the audience feels the yearning for death along with the characters. Is that it, that the show so successfully makes the audience feel what the characters feel so that they too anticipate sweet release from the torment of this show? Is that what he was going for, because if so, man, well done Sammy, what a gottamn masterpiece of pain you’ve created. It’s a f-ing triumph. If he didn’t want us to feel that death was preferable to watching this show for much longer, then I, along with everyone who left, missed something.

INFORMATION

Rough for Theatre II was just under a half hour, which means your interval bathroom break comes when you don’t need it, adding to the whole torture vibe of the evening. Endgame is then an hour and half, which is the exact amount of time it’s safe to watch this show for before one loses one’s mind.

The Old Vic renovation is fine – there’s still not enough room in the lobby (what a mess) but the bathrooms in the basement (where you go if you sit in the stalls, so get an aisle towards the back if you need) are better and bigger. Also, they are not defined by gender, just by whether they contain stalls or urinals, which is how every bathroom should be since it’s great for everyone (except men who need to go #2) (hey that’s what Beckett is with this show!).

STAGE DOOR

Like all Danny Rad shows, people were SPRINTING to the stage door in droves, so I skipped out on adding ‘trampled by horrible crowds’ to the night’s list of agonies. (Also what was I gonna say to them, yeesh.)

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