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The Barbican are currently putting on a lot of Beckett-related events to celebrate the centenary of his birthday, and I wondered if anyone else had been to see any of it. I went to see Endgame last night, so that's what most of this post is going to be about, but I'd like to hear about the other plays of his you've seen as well, and any personal experiences of putting on a Beckett play would rock.
So, to Endgame. Someone behind us commented that the stage looked too big for such a spare, intimate play, and I thought that was handled really well - the set made the stage a lot smaller, and looked even more restricted than it actually was. When Clov pushed Hamm around in the chair, the room looked tiny -the chair would barely fit in the corner under the windows. I was impressed with the way they used the space; the last time I saw the play, I was at university, and the 'studio' really was small, so I liked seeing it in a larger space that had to be made into a smaller one.
Peter Dinklage played Clov and was, I thought, excellent -there was an interesting contrast between him and Kenneth Cranham's Hamm, as the former seemed self-consciously stagey in the way he spoke his lines, whereas I got the idea that this Hamm really believed that the things that were happening were new every day. The way Beckett writes does mirror very well the way people actually talk, and perhaps the production I went to see at uni didn't bring that out so well* -in that one, both Clov and Hamm seemed equally bored with the whole affair. Whilst that's a valid way of interpreting the play, I liked the contrast in the Barbican production between Clov's resignation to the relentlessness of everything in his life and Hamm's vicious enthusiasm for that same relentlessness.
*obviously not, as it was a student production as opposed to a professional one
Whilst I've certainly not done it justice here, it was an excellent production, and I'd like to know about other people's experiences of Beckett in performance -as I said, whether that's watching or participating. |
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