“Endgame” at the Irish Repertory Theatre (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Once, on an exuberant high after seeing an impeccable production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, I told my friend that I thought I could be content only seeing Beckett plays for the rest of my life. I don’t know if I meant it or had really thought through that statement, but I’ve had several experiences in my life where I’ve seen a production of a Beckett play that felt like the exact thing I want from a piece of theatre. I’ve left invigorated by the form, challenged, exhausted, and inspired. Within Beckett’s rigidity, an artist can find ways to bring themself forward, to show us what feels like a secret part and let us connect to it. In being bound to the playwright’s strictures, where there are gaps, the artist shines through. 

That’s sort of what’s happening in the current revival of Endgame at the Irish Repertory Theatre. The incomparable actors Bill Irwin and John Douglas Thompson are burrowed deep in Beckett’s text and, in those depths, their own strengths (Thompson’s meticulous specificity of text, Irwin’s intelligent physical comedy) are on glorious display. They make Beckett’s complicated business seem easy. Both actors disappear in the parts, each believable on his own. In different productions and maybe each with a different actor, they might coalesce into something transcendent, but as it stands they are two disconnected performances. 

Beckett intentionally sets Hamm (Thompson) and Clov (Irwin) as opposites: one can’t stand, one can’t sit, etc. They’re two halves, though, dependent on each other. The characters have a long history and they’ve survived something destructive, but unnamed. That history isn’t there in this staging. When they speak to each other, there’s no reciprocation. One person says something and the other person says something and the two lines feel like they have nothing to do with each other, like they’ve hit some kind of invisible block in the air. When either of them is doing something alone–particularly when Thompson is delivering Hamm’s monologues–the text breathes. Otherwise, it’s hard to latch onto and the dynamic between the characters is impossible to understand. 

Without that central relationship, Ciarán O’Reilly’s production relies on its design elements and unnecessary underscoring to make its points. Charlie Corcoran’s scenic design and Orla Long’s costume design do bring fresh takes on the world of Endgame. At the top of the text, Beckett calls for a “[b]are interior…Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn.” Corcoran’s interpretation of that spare environment evokes a bombed-out room, perhaps the nursery where Hamm and Clov grew up. The way the windows are knocked out of the back wall was particularly exciting and something I had not seen in an interpretation of that stage direction before. Long’s costumes are convincingly dusty. The faded glamor of Hamm’s robe is holding onto its last legs and his large, round black-out glasses form alternate eyes that seem to see, even though he is blind. When Clov appears in a second costume at the end of the play, the assortment of items he’s wearing and holding say so much about the character in a heartbreaking way. 

Lighting designer Michael Gottlieb creates shifts in the light that are unrelated to the characters opening or closing the window or the time of day shifting. When characters move upstage, the lights come on up there, when they move down, the lights go out. The practical location of the light source is unclear and at odds with Beckett’s isolated location. The physical environment needs to be logical in order to let the action of the play be absurd. If there are to be shifts in the lighting, the play begs for something subtler. Likewise, the score by M. Florian Staab intrudes on the play. As the lights go down, there is a musical prologue that sounds like a horror movie and establishes the wrong tone for what follows. The performances and the score are always out of step. The soundscape is much more effective when Staab’s sound design isolates the ticking of a clock or the other ambient noise of the house. 

When Hamm’s parents, Nagg (Joe Grifasi) and Nell (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), pop out of their ashbins and share a scene, the play becomes what it should be the whole time. Grifasi and Chevannes, giving only chest-up performances from within trash cans, create a relationship with history, with stakes, with genuine connection and feeling. Chevannes’ voice evokes old money with her rounded tones and her elegiac longing every time she says “yesterday.” Grifasi’s Nagg cares deeply about her, but he can also be petulant, much like their son. When he returns in a later scene, the torture Hamm has put him through is evident in Grifasi’s pure resignation to his fate. These two secondary characters are carrying the weight of the play and their scenes feel like what Endgame needs to be.

On paper, this revival should be an event: two of our greatest stage actors doing Beckett always is. But it’s not enough to have two incredible artists cooking on their own if they’re not making a common dish. They have about five more weeks–maybe what Irwin and Thompson need is a little more time to slow down and hear each other, to bring the past in and make that the problem between their characters. As it stands, Hamm and Clov are just irritated and so are we.