Review: The Apocalypse Is Funnier Than You'd Expect in Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Stories about how the world will end are nothing new. From the Bible's book of Revelation to today's zombie movies (you might even include our aptly named penchant for "doomsday scrolling"), we're fascinated with theories about how humanity is going to one day descend into chaos and ultimately do itself in.

Nowadays, climate change has made thoughts of our demise seem less theoretical than terrifyingly imminent. When Samuel Beckett's Endgame was first staged in 1957, audiences had nuclear annihilation on their minds. With the recent return of that threat, now seems as good a time as any to take another look at Beckett's comically apocalyptic work, which has the distinction of being the play out of all his dramatic pieces that the Nobel Prize-winning author disliked least. Waiting for Godot is better known, but Beckett felt that the one-act Endgame (running about 90 minutes) best encapsulated his ideas about human existence and what makes it possible to endure life even at its basest and bleakest.

In its new production, Irish Repertory Theatre has gotten the bleak part down pat with Charlie Corcoran's set, a ramshackle "living" room that appears to be coming down around itself, with tattered curtains hanging in bay windows and bricks strewn about the floor, and Orla Long's costumes look equally threadbare and unkempt. Sound designer M. Florian Staab quietly fills the air with his subtly menacing music, while Michael Gottlieb's masterfully suppressed lighting adds to the destitute scene by going only where it needs to go and no farther.

In the center of this depressing hovel sits the sightless, chair-ridden Hamm (a frighteningly tyrannical John Douglas Thompson), who barks orders at his lumbering, reluctant servant, Clov (a darkly comical Bill Irwin playing Caliban to Hamm's Prospero). As in Godot, not a lot happens over the course of the play. Clov enters and draws the curtains, only to reveal bricked-up windows with small holes high up for him to look out on the desolate land and motionless sea. We soon learn that Hamm and Clov are among the last survivors of some unnamed cataclysm that has erased most traces of life from the earth. Days filled with giving and taking orders, asking for pain killers, getting annoyed, and making fruitless threats to leave each other are all they have left. Some couples in the audience will relate.

But of course no one leaves, either because they physically can't or because there's nowhere else to go. At least they can take a break from each other now and then. Two nearby trashcans house what remains of Hamm's parents, Nagg (a sadly perky Joe Grifasi) and Nell (an exuberantly melancholy Patrice Johnson Chevannes). Both legless and confined to the rubbish, they occasionally pop up like Whac-A-Moles to chatter, ask for a sugarplum (there aren't any), and remember the past. "Ah yesterday," says Nell with pathetic joy that sounds vaguely like hope, only to be "bottled" back down into the can when Hamm feels the attention drawn away from him.

Beckett's plays can be quite funny, in an existentially dreadful kind of way, and Endgame, while not a knee-slapper, has its fair share of solid laughs. Director Ciarán O'Reilly is sensitive to Beckett's humor and generally allows for the pacing required to draw out many of those elusive jokes. Casting Irwin, a professional clown and comedian, in the role of Clov was a no-brainer. He's spent his life perfecting the art of clowning as well as immersing himself in Beckett's writings, and in 2018 he put those talents on display in his eye-opening theater piece On Beckett at Irish Rep. To see him work his magic in this play is worth the price of admission.

Thompson brings with him the gravitas that has helped earn him the reputation of being one of the most talented Shakespearean actors of our time. His Hamm shakes the theater like Lear roaring at an unseen storm. Grifasi lends amusing charm to the old father Nagg, and his scenes with the marvelous Johnson Chevannes contain some of the play's most memorable and tender moments. For her part, Johnson Chevannes, who has the smallest role, makes every word count, and she gets some of the biggest laughs in the process. It's too bad that we don't get to see her onstage longer.

But then none of us is onstage all that long, the play reminds us. As bleak and strange as Endgame's world is, it still fascinates and rings true 65 years later because we're no closer to getting to the bottom of its questions, which every generation is compelled to ask itself anew as it stares into the abyss. "What's happening? What's happening?" shouts Hamm into the void. "Something is taking its course," replies Clov. It's as good an answer as any.