Endgame (Το τέλος του παιχνιδιού)

If you are looking for a literal representation of Beckett’s bleakest play, the Πειραματική Σκηνή της «Τέχνης»’s («Art»’s Experimental Scene) version probably won’t turn out to be your cup of tea. Indeed, it is likely that the pedantic, kill-joy Irish director would have not stayed for more than 5 minutes among Theatre T’s packed Monday crowd, given all the liberties taken by his Greek counterpart Glikeria Kalaitzi. who decided – perhaps forced by the limited space – to overturn some highly-significant stage directions. Clov’s and Hamm’s faces may be of the same colour as Nagg’s and Nell’s, thus calling off the whole chess-like dichotomy of the text, and what was first left, may now be right, thus rendering the choreography completely topsy-turvy, but lo: this is the theatre’s true nature – to question itself at every turn.

And so the one act begins: endgame, that peculiar situation in which both chessmen already know the outcome of their match, but nonetheless keep playing (HAMM: «Me—(he yawns)—to play. Can there be misery—(he yawns)—loftier than mine?») is terribly akin to our worldly stay, forced as we are to trudge through our daily mishaps only to arrive at a finish line we never really want to reach. And yet we struggle, with «insistence, patience and courage», as director and first actress to play Nel, Kristina Tzigou, said in her 1967 lecture in a pre-Junta Thessaloniki; we struggle to affirm our fleeting existence with trivial actions, dominating and letting ourselves be dominated just to dispel the bugaboos of uncertainty and death.

Putting on stage Endgame is first and foremost an act of emancipation. As a matter of fact, by way of a super-human effort, Beckett managed to break free from all that which used to tie him down to conventions and traditions. He went beyond a divided Ireland, a bewildering Paris and a patronizing Joyce, and devoted himself completely to the avant-garde, despite it being so hard with literature, and with literary drama, to let go of the past’s safe harbour. Within this heart-rending struggle between identity and abstraction, the 1969 Noble Prize winner chose to speak his mind both with objectivity and reason-laden madness. The so-called absurdity of his piece, then, must be represented according to the rules of the game he himself had set forth, and cannot be tainted by conventional gimmicks such as suspension of disbelief and utterly believable characters.

Dimitris Naziris (Hamm) and Efi Stamouly (Clov) do a wondrous job at giving flesh and blood to their lines, and the result is a fine play which respectfully bows its head to everything that Beckett once scorned. If we consider his project as completed, trying to give it a different shape might be equivalent to taking a step back and stumbling on the pile of dead-end moves he himself must have rejected before finding his ultimately strategy. And yet, we must be thankful to «Art»’s Experimental Scene work, which possibly opens up again the dialogue with theoretical ideas that might be of use to younger artists, as much as they were when misery, despair and alienation were the common barbwire which gripped the whole of Europe.