Chris Gascoyne on Endgame by Samuel Beckett
According to Samuel Beckett, nothing is funnier than unhappiness. As his existentialist play Endgame opens at Citizens Theatre and HOME, actor Chris Gascoyne talks about working with David Neilson, his role as Clov and the theatre of the absurd.
“Hello lovely,” says a warm, familiar voice. Chris Gascoyne, known to the nation as Peter Barlow of Coronation Street, is on the other end of the line. He has just half an hour to talk, as he needs to get back to the rehearsal room where he and fellow Corrie star, David Neilson, are putting the finishing touches to a new production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
It was during a similar break on the set of the soap that the seed for Endgame was sown. “It was after David had played Lucky in Waiting for Godot, about eight years ago,” Gascoyne recalls. “One day we got talking about Beckett at lunchtime. We just got chatting and decided that it would be a great exercise to read one of his plays together to see what we got out of it.”
What began as a lunchtime musing between colleagues developed into six months of evening readings as friends. It turns out the pair have more than cobbles in common, and their shared fascination with Beckett stems from their training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, albeit almost 20 years apart. From a cup of tea in one hand and a script in the other, the duo’s vision grew into a full-scale production directed by Dominic Hill of Glasgow's Citizens Theatre.
The sense of an ending
For the average person, the name Samuel Beckett unearths memories of studying Waiting for Godot at school; of hours and hours spent searching for the answers – to no avail. Endgame, in all its existentialist glory, promises more of the same.
“In Waiting for Godot, they’re waiting for something to begin, and in Endgame, they’re waiting for something to end,” says Gascoyne, amused. “But it doesn’t end, until it’s ended. And when is the end? Will it never end? We can’t conclusively say it’s ended or if it’s only just the beginning.”
It is Theatre of the Absurd, after all.
But for Gascoyne and Neilson, Endgame is anything but ridiculous – rather it's a painfully beautiful and honest portrayal of the human condition in which we can all find an element of ourselves. Languishing between life and death, the blind tyrant Hamm and his resentful companion Clov – played by Gascoyne – are irrevocably bound to one another. They pass their days in a filthy, bare room, caught in a loop of futile routines.
Sombre as it sounds, Gascoyne admits that it was his fascination with the macabre that drew him to Endgame in the first place. “I like the darkness in the play, and the way things are never as we say they are, but I also love the comedy in it – it has real depth.”
Theatre of the Absurd
Nowhere do comedy and tragedy come closer than in the Theatre of Absurd. Where human existence lacks purpose or meaning, we can either weep or howl with laughter.
Written after Beckett’s brother passed away, and based on the undertones of his relationship with his wife, Endgame draws upon themes of death but, perhaps more profoundly, on our dependency on other people to take care of us, fuelled by a fear of being alone.
“The characters are in the land of last things, and things that are no more,” says Gascoyne. “One can’t leave the other, because one says there’s nobody else and the other replies that there’s nowhere else.”
In a play that evokes such a bleak outlook on life and relationships, should we really be laughing? Or is laughing all we can do?
“It’s an absurd piece of theatre: the comedy is in the situation and the characters,” he says. “But it’s no Ray Cooney farce, let’s put it that way.”
(Continues below)
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Beckett's vision
Obscure and open-ended, Endgame is a treat for an actor. But while there’s more than enough food for thought, Gascoyne warns against studying the play too closely: “It’s nothing you can work out with your mind; you can’t play philosophy, you have to play intention and action. Besides, it’s ultimately up to the audience; they make of it what they will depending on what their lives and relationships are like.”
In a play so reliant on interpretation, it comes as a surprise to learn of the restrictions imposed by the playwright on productions of Endgame. The play is accompanied by instructions as to what a director can and cannot change about the piece, so that Beckett’s vision of the original 1957 text is honoured.
Gascoyne is quick to jump to the playwright’s defence. “That’s not Beckett being awkward,” he says. “People make him sound like he had a terrible arrogance in that his work can’t be messed with, but that’s not the way it is. If you start to mess around with it, and have liberty to do whatever you want, it will no longer be the same piece with the same resonance and the same point. But he’s never saying don’t make the production your own. Just don’t have Hamm hanging from the ceiling and Clov with a pair of angel wings on. It’s not open in that sense, and I don’t think it should be. He’s done all the work already, there’s nothing we can add to make it better.”
Our time is up. Gascoyne must return to the rehearsal room and to the mind of Samuel Beckett. A word of advice, perhaps, for an audience looking to make sense of absurdity? “Don’t expect anything. Don’t try and work it out. Just come and let it wash over you.”
Endgame is at Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, until 20 Feb, and HOME, Manchester, 25 Feb-12 Mar