Not many people are fond of it fewer still can reflect it. It’s a very particular shade of gray, that Beckettian brand of hopelessness that falls just this side of nihilism. “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that,” Hamm tells his servant, but the alternative – the death outside the cellar door – is always worse. But what one feels throughout this Endgame, much more than that, is the hopelessness of a Beckett existence – a life in which almost every living thing has disappeared, in which we know a man is alive solely because he cries. Beckett was perverse enough a playwright, I think, to want his audiences to feel a bit of tedium while his characters suffer from major amounts of the same. Yet those performances matter less than the mood that director Doles maintains throughout the play – a mood that’s alternately futile and sardonic and one that’s varied enough, against many odds, to sustain a theatergoer’s interest just about all the time. Neal Demaray, although considerably too young for his part, does well enough as the ancient Nagg (even though, he, too, suffers from a surfeit of physical tics), and Anne Keidel is fine as Nell, who is barely seen. Phillip Mansfield isn’t able to supply the same resonances in his performance as Clov: This toady is a bit too much like Dracula’s Renfield, like a Peter Lorre, too full of mannerisms by half and with too little feeling underneath. This is a man entirely capable of building a world of dependence and misery around him just so he’ll have company – like the solitary child, he says, who makes up imaginary playmates “so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark.” “Can there be misery loftier than mine?” he asks with a peevish sigh, yet this character is much more than a self-pitying fop. Nowhere is that clearer than in the masterful performance of Tom Sherohman, whose Hamm is humorous, menacing, pompous and effete.
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