Endgame - Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Endgame

★★★★ The radical pleasure of simply hearing Beckett’s extraordinary text.

There is something unexpectedly thrilling about simply hearing Endgame.

In Flabbergast Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s canonical work, the four performers inhabit the strange, exhausted world of Hamm, Clov, Nell and Nagg with such conviction that the production feels less like a staging of a classic than a temporary entry into another universe. The performances are extraordinary: physically precise, emotionally inhabited and, above all, vocally assured.

Beckett’s writing has a musicality that can be flattened by familiarity. Here, the vocal chops of the performers bring that music to the surface. The rhythms, repetitions, pauses and abrupt shifts in register are not merely delivered with deliberation; they are played. It is more than a masterclass in vocal delivery. It is a reminder of how extraordinary it is to actually hear Beckett’s text.

And that, without being perjorative, is one of the great pleasures of this production. The language is allowed to do the work. There is no need to decorate it or over-explain it. The performers trust the words, and the words land.

The production itself is comparatively modest. The setting is deliberately ordinary, and the physical world does not attempt to compete with Beckett’s bleak, stripped-back universe. That restraint serves the performers well. There is nowhere to hide, and nowhere for the audience's attention to go except to those in front of us.

The circumstances of the performance are less helpful. The venue is frankly awful.

Endgame requires concentration, and the physical conditions make that concentration harder than it needs to be.

But the opportunity remains a rare one: to encounter a canonical work performed with this degree of aplomb. Flabbergast brings considerable physical and vocal intelligence to Beckett without smothering the text beneath theatrical cleverness.

For all the talk of innovation and disruption around canonical theatre, sometimes the most radical thing is simply to hear a great text spoken extraordinarily well.

Review by Kate Gaul