L U C I A N O G AT T I

Choreography of Disobedience:
Becketts Endgame
Clov Lets stop playing
Hamm Never!
Since its 3 April 1957 opening at the Royal Court Theatre of
London under the direction of Roger Blin, Endgames effectiveness
in questioning what is understood as theatre remains intact. There
were many who braved the discomfort provoked by Samuel
Becketts second play by assigning a universal, placating meaning
to the apparently purposeless routine of four characters conned
to a place laconically described as refuge or shelter. In the
rst reviews of the play that came out, frequent references to
despair and hopelessness in a post-apocalyptic world attempted to
characterize Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nells survival as a terminal
situation.
1
Journal of Beckett Studies 23.2 (2014): 222243
Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2014.0105
Journal of Beckett Studies
www.euppublishing.com/jobs
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 223
It was not long before Becketts theatre was appropriated by
French existentialism. This took place at the onset of the 1960s
and became an illustration of the senselessness of the human
condition in the Cold War era. Destruction, war, and metaphysical
absurdity were the keywords for this rst reception. It crystallized
and was diffused through Martin Esslins inuential study, The
Theatre of the Absurd (1961), in which he considers Beckett as an
important part of the landscape of the new European theatre.
In an essay contemporary to Esslins book, Theodor W. Adorno
sought to emphasize the autonomy of the Beckettian drama in the
face of this type of appropriation (Adorno, 1991). The very need
to nd a revealing meaning behind the dramatic composition is
examined and severely criticized, along with other existentialist,
metaphysical assumptions. As with Kafkas prose, also one of
Adornos objects, Endgame was seen as revealing the obsolete
nature of any interpretation dened as a redirection of the artistic
conguration toward a substantive idea of meaning. There would
be little underlying meaning to uncover, no world viewtransmitted
by its author, no message to be deciphered by its audience.
Endgame hermetically resists both metaphysically-assured meaning
and representation of a story beyond what happens onstage; it
may demand another set of criteria for interpretation. This explains
the need for a critical approach that would leave the historical
or philosophical references more or less arbitrary and exterior to
the play in the background, foregrounding the historicity of the
material from which it was produced.
Within contemporary theory on the theatre, the Adornian
interpretation enabled reafrmations of the autonomy of drama
or of its vestiges on the post-avant-garde scene, signalling the
failure of avant-garde movement between aesthetics and social
praxis. As we will discuss later, this is a problem which resonates in
works such as Christoph Menkes theory of tragedy, which clings
strongly to the notion of the autonomy of aesthetic experience
(Menke, 2005). At the opposite end of the spectrum, enjoying ample
inuence on the current horizon, we encounter the apology of
theatrical situation, as defended by Hans-Thies Lehmanns post-
dramatic theatre theory (Lehmann, 2003). Looking at a number of
developments which, since the 1960s, have moved theatre closer
to performance, happenings and the visual arts, the author presents
224 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
an argument that situates drama as an outmoded historical form.
For these purposes, he employs a circumscribed notion of drama,
marked by the stylized intersubjective conict in the dialogue the
dramatic collision and by its economy of textual presentation.
Thus, the importance of signicant changes in dramatic form
throughout the twentieth century is naturally eclipsed. This is the
case whether one is referring to the introduction of epic elements
into drama (not only by Brechtian theatre), to the variety of
traditions that produce reections on theatrical performance or
even to the epic characteristics of the plays that nourish his theory.
Ultimately, such theory aims to discard concepts such as mimesis
and representation in order to assert a theatre of the real which makes
the terms reality and representation quite indistinguishable.
The present essay seeks to situate Endgame within this debate
by sustaining a particular hypothesis: that Becketts work as a
stager made another equation for drama and staging possible,
one which may consider an important contribution to the theory
of contemporary theatre. The organization of drama around a
totalizing principle, or the equation of dramatic composition and
the materiality of the stage, are issues within the current debate
which run through all of Becketts activities as playwright and
stager. In this context, the notes to his montage of Endgame at
the Schiller Theater in Berlin in 1967 take on a decisive role,
demonstrating a highly conscious and advanced use of staging
mechanisms meant to problematize issues such as meaning and
representation. Thus, it is not a matter of constructing a dichotomy
between autonomy of representation and reality of performance,
but of showing Becketts contradictory approach to these issues,
which he does in such a way that this conict becomes the very
raison dtre of theatrical experience.
As a director of his own plays, Beckett aimed to preserve
the independence of the staging from interpretations that would
close the semantic eld that the theatrical situation opens up.
The spectator should not be induced to extract a meaning from
events presented in a realistic manner, nor should he forget that
he nds himself in an auditorium, but confront the very event
of the theatrical experience. Beckett was not the only one to give
such importance to stage composition. His specicity, in the face of
other experiences of transformation of the theatre in the twentieth
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 225
century, such as that of Brecht or Artaud, lies in the fact that
he distances the stage from the audience, which is traditionally
a reference to the theatre of illusionistic purport. It is thus that,
during 1967 rehearsals in Berlin, he makes a rather surprising
recommendation to his actors: the play is to be acted as though
there were a fourth wall where the footlights are (McMillan and
Fehsenfeld, 1988, 204).
The fourth wall may be seen as the quintessence of illusionistic
theatre, at least since Diderots Discourse on Dramatic Poetry. The
unequivocal separation of stage and audience would be the most
efcient way to involve the spectators in the presentation, making
them forget that they are in a theatre and convincing them of the
authenticity of the scene. This is precisely where Diderots proposal
takes us. He states that a plays perfection consists of imitating an
action so precisely that the spectator, repeatedly deceived, imagines
that he is watching the action itself. Such naturalness is built on
stage, but offered to the spectator as if it were nature itself, to which
human conicts are equalized on the illusionistic stage. This is then
revealed as an invitation to oblivion: the spectators must forget
they are at the theatre, effectively taking what is simulated on stage
as life itself while author, director and actors must concentrate their
interest in the characters, isolating themselves from the presence of
the audience, beyond the stage lights, for whom they act. In this
way, Diderot recommends, whether composing or acting, the actors
should not think of the spectator, but imagine a great wall at the
proscenium, separating them from the audience, and act as if the
curtain had never gone up.
The illusionism of the fourth wall may seem to be a strange
arrival point for a drama that has apparently turned against its
own representational vocation. Would Becketts play be at risk of
being regarded a step backward in relation to the greatest efforts
in twentieth-century theatre? Critics of illusionism and naturalism
in theatrical presentation as diverse as Brecht and Artaud sought
the transformation of theatrical experience through the demolition
of the fourth wall, and consequently, through the critical and
physical involvement of the spectator. Beckett, however, prefers
to go in the opposite direction by distancing his audience. Thus,
one of the difculties in his drama is to understand how such
distancing becomes a condition that allows theatre to appear as
226 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
an autonomous situation, one that cannot be reduced to mere
representation of actions previously congured within a text.
The controversy surrounding the fourth wall makes it possible
to situate Becketts drama not only in relation to decisive
experiences of twentieth-century European drama, but also
to recent debates around post-dramatic theatre, to employ
the terminology coined through the publication of Lehmanns
homonymous book in 1999. It is in this context that one must
understand Christoph Menkes interpretation of Becketts reference
to the fourth wall as a step back in relation to the expectations
of avant-garde theatre, sacriced in favour of the beauty that
the symmetrical organization of the play provides. Menkes
interpretation is structured around his explanation of why Clov
cannot reach freedom by the end of the play, that is, why he cannot
escape from Hamms domain and leave the refuge. According to
Menke, this is linked to a form of dialogue that is symmetrically
organized in two poles: the construction of meaning through
Hamms narrative impulse and the sabotage of that meaning by
Clovs lines. As one pole presupposes the other, the conict is
not resolved through the freeing of either of them; rather, the
statements of one presuppose those of the other. The ending merely
suspends the conict in an image that, in its symmetry, evokes
the beginning of the play. In this way, the aesthetic experience
provided by Becketts theatre cannot aspire to that mediation
between aesthetics and practical life that avant-garde theatre of the
beginning of the twentieth century provided, but renders an image
of the failure of such mediation. The result is a drama that shuts
itself down as an object of distanced contemplation. Its beauty its
aesthetic success is the price paid for such practical failure:
Becketts theatre rebuilds the fourth wall and makes an object
of distanced contemplation out of the dramatic course. Thus, it
congeals into a tableau, the structure organizes itself according
to symmetries, analogies and repetitions (which Beckett treats
in such a decisive way in his choreographic staging of the
play), the circle between beginning and end closes itself. But
in the mathematical-musical beauty of his order, Becketts
play can only appear because the action that it presents was
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 227
suspended. The failure in action: the failure of every attempt
to change is the condition for the aesthetic success of the
play. In Endgame, aesthetic success and practical success do
not correspond as the modern model for tragedy promised or
expected, but they repel one another strongly. Clovs failure is
the price that Beckett was willing to pay for the beauty of his
play. (Menke, 2005, 2012)
2
Underlying that ill-succeeded mediation between stage and
reality is the diagnosis of the failure of historical avant-garde
movements, and consequently, the post-avant-gardist re-statement
of the autonomy of drama against praxis. The object of post-avant-
gardist theatre, in its turn, would be precisely that failure, which
is raised to the condition of a theme. As such the nal tableau in
Endgame the impossibility for Clov to reach his freedom denes
it as meta-tragedy: Beckett stages the tragedy of the game, that
is, the failure of the passage between game and praxis.
3
This
interpretation is conceived in the context of a controversy against
one of the central components of the conception of post-dramatic
theatre, namely, the pretension of theatre ooding into life. Menke
tries to give sharpness to the limits between art and reality,
explaining the autonomy of drama from a double gaze, attentive
to dramatic conict as well as to its character as dramatic game.
Drama acquires awareness of its own theatricality,
4
providing the
spectator with an ironic and distanced view. In this perspective,
the moments of caesura of scenic illusionism (Hlderlin, Brecht
and Benjamin are recovered here) reveal the staging of failure in
the passages between the seriousness of praxis and the beauty
of the game as the very suspension of the domination of the
aesthetic.
In a debate with Menke, Lehmanns response consisted of
restating that this self-reectiveness of drama leaves the theatrical
situation untouched, crystallized in the very well-marked domains
separating the spectator in the audience and the representation of
ctional action onstage. His objection goes beyond the observation
that the currently generalized imperative of aesthetic shattering
has to a great extent neutralized the de-stabilizing potential of
interruption. The latter may again be taken up, without great
228 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
difculty, through conventional forms that re-direct the spectator to
continuity after the caesura. The central point to his argument is in
the greater interpenetration between the domains of aesthetic and
practical life. The theatre cannot be content to offer a reection that
destabilizes the serene and ironic position of the spectator. Rather,
it must go against reality, says Lehmann, confounding game,
seriousness, responsibility, innocence, real praxis and aesthetic
game, without losing awareness that such differentiation may
not be renounced. Against the rigorous autonomy defended by
Menke, Lehmann proposes that theatre may be more than the
thematization of the tension between praxis and presentation
(Spiel): it is a formof real-corporeal praxis that maintains the double
character of real life process (praxis) and aesthetic ction (game) in
each of its elements, showing that there are no clear boundaries
around aesthetic and extra-aesthetic domains (Lehmann, 2007,
2214).
To situate Endgame within this discussion may be a useful
way to evaluate its current relevance. The Beckettian stage has
never been a negative reference to its own exterior, but only one
staging space. By turning theatre against its own representative
vocation, Endgame approaches the contemporary valuation the
theory of post-dramatic theatre of the here and now of theatrical
situation. But to move from this play to dismissing representation
in favour of the pure act of showing as if freed from all objects is
an excessively hurried solution for the struggle Beckett initiated
between the vestiges of dramatic meaning and the materiality
of the stage. Likewise, if the same play is considered to be
based on the theatrical nature of the conict between Clov and
Hamm as reinforced by Becketts 1967 staging to analyze it
exclusively as drama, as done by Menke, has too high a price: it
disregards the potential opening up of meaning that is proper to
theatrical situation, a key element for rethinking the problem of the
relationship between art and social praxis.
Becketts directorial work at the Schiller Theatre demonstrates
that Endgame was conceived through conscious and advanced use
of staging resources. It is not just the conict between Hamm
and Clov that is only fullled by means of its staging, but the
text as well is constantly altered so as to make it inseparable
from the place and the way in which it is pronounced. Beckett
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 229
himself emphasized well before this staging that the conception
of Endgame was already much closer to the theatrical experience
than his previous play, Waiting for Godot. The physical limitations
of the characters in Endgame, beyond the characterization of each,
must also be seen as distinguished forms of relation with the scenic
space. In Endgame, the title itself is revealing of such closeness to the
theatrical environment. The game refers to staging as a domain in
itself, comprised of the mobilization of the resources necessary to a
theatrical presentation. The English, French and German versions,
all of which Beckett worked on, reinforce the non-dissociability of
playing and enacting (play, jouer, spielen). The end, in turn, refers
to the effort of bringing this process to an end, as well as to
the depletion of the resources needed to do so. The confrontation
between Hamm and Clov in Becketts staging, the centre of the
play does not develop with a common aim in sight, but as a
dispute over different positions regarding an open end.
The conict between text and its staging appears at the very
moment when Clov and Hamm come onstage. Each in his own
way resorts to mechanisms of theatrical representation that are
meant to estrange it. The beginning of Endgame is marked by the
fading of that magic instant in which the boundaries between
the material composition of the stage and representation proper
can be perceived. From the very beginning, Clov sets out to
examine the stage. The use of techniques of slapstick humour
in the characters movements is not meant to make the scene
humorous but to disrupt the continuity between the nality of
an action (looking through the window) and the movement that
it requires (positioning the ladder under the window). Finality
and movement, dissociated by the ladder which is always turned
to the back of the stage, evoke and suspend the premise of a
purpose for what the character is doing onstage. In that sequence,
when Clov removes the sheets that cover Hamm in his chair and
the cans where Nagg and Nell lie, he alludes to the theatrical
practice of keeping scenery covered between show days, explicitly
taking responsibility for the plays organization. Through these
initial movements, not only does he announce the moment when
everything is ready to start, but he also disturbs the evocative sense
of the end in his rst line, just before he withdraws to his kitchen
and leaves the stage to Hamm:
230 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
Clov: [Fixed gaze, tonelessly.] Finished, its nished, nearly
nished, it must be nearly nished. [Pause.] Grain upon grain,
one by one, and one day, suddenly, theres a heap, a little heap,
the impossible heap. (Beckett, 1990, 93)
The text points to the indistinctness of the ending and
its approach. Reference to the Zeno paradox reinforces the
hypothetical or even impossible character of their convergence.
From the point of view of stage preparation, explicated by Clovs
silent movements, the line refers to the plays temporal limits as
well: this preparation is the condition for both the beginning and,
remotely, the conclusion, which would return the scenery to its
original, sheet-covered place. In the indications that were provided
for the 1980 Riverside Studios staging, Beckett highlighted Clovs
perplexity at that initial moment: All seemingly in order, yet a
change (Gontarski, 1995, 478). It is that order put into effect that
seems to separate him from the end, as manifested in a later line:
Clov: [Straightening up.] I love order. Its my dream. A world
where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last
place, under the last dust. (Beckett, 1990, 120)
Clov is not announcing his desire to escape the bunker and
Hamms domination. The end he aspires to is the return of the
scenic space to a state of repose or suspension. In the face of this
goal, his initial line explains the paradox of concluding the stages
that prepare for this end, as if the course of the play were nothing
more than a cumbersome but necessary crossing over toward it. His
line is thus a prelude to the opening of the curtains, a moment that
comes before the play, which is then absorbed by the dynamics of
the drama itself, marking the contact point between the theatrical
apparatus and the plays beginning.
For Hamm as well, the beginning of the play is marked by that
contact. Under Clovs sheet, he awaits the beginning of the game,
his face covered by an old rag which he ritualistically folds after
Clov leaves, alternating his rst line with the movement of tucking
it into his pocket:
Hamm: Me [he yawns] to play. [He holds the handkerchief
spread out before him.] Old stancher! (Beckett, 1990, 93).
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 231
It is reasonable to suppose that Hamms handkerchief evokes the
curtain at the proscenium arch which Beckett had suppressed. The
traditional resource of illusionist content is dismissed by the author
and transferred to the interior of the play. The line evinces yet
another convention, presented here also as a chess game metaphor:
the alternation of the movements of each player as a reference
to the alternation of the characters in the dialogue, the engine of
action in its dramatic form. Clovs initial line presumes both his
existence prior to the play as well as his awareness of belonging
to a theatrical process. When he verbalizes his turn to play, he
is also announcing his turn onstage, conating action with the
very process of enactment. Hamm describes the function of a
dramatic role: the actor onstage is supposed to start acting. But
instead of playing just any character, he explains the function
of an actor at the beginning of a play. This explanation is not,
however, carried out previously by the actor. It is not the actor
representing this rst line, but Hammhimself, pointing to a denite
distinctive mark of Becketts theatre. The consciousness or the
explanation that it is theatre and not representation of a possible
action its theatricality that is at issue does not originate in the
distance between actor and character, as in Brechts epic theatre,
for example, but is a prerogative of the character himself.
All of this allows for some considerations on the specicity
of the Beckettian character. At least in his rst plays, such as
Endgame and Happy Days, the character is not only that absent
instance presented by the actor but also a performer working with
his position onstage. This form of theatricality problematizes the
relationship between what is real and what is ctional, countering a
conception of theatre as representation with another, characterized
by the passages between representation and situation. It is not the
actor who demolishes the fourth wall in order to call the audiences
attention to the ctitious nature of the character, but the latter who
is aware that he is doing theatre and exposes his own theatricality.
In Endgame, Clov and Hamm show awareness of the theatrical
character of their lines and movements by the distance or
strangeness they confer on them, which does not arise from that
momentary distinction between actor and character that interrupts
both the course of action and illusionist effect. Such interruptions
would be but an assimilated form of theatricality, running up
232 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
against the audiences expectations. When applied to Beckett,
such interpretative techniques are mediocre, leading to a mocking
sense of humour that is characteristic of badly-staged productions.
Laughter in theatre is an immediate mode of communication,
founded on some form of empathy, whether with the staged
scene, the form of representation or the playwrights stance.
Endgame distances itself from this type of effect by a withdrawal
that is able to annul the basis for mutual recognition between
audience and staging. A good production may cause discomfort
and disorientation, but not laughter (Simon, 1986, 75; Kalb,
1989, 24).
Adorno believed that humour lost its function in Endgame,
breaking the link between joke and laughter. Its premises were
emptied out: a canon of laughable things and a position of
reconciliation from which one might laugh (Adorno, 1997, 257).
Beyond this argument, one should be reminded that the difculty
of laughter is the result of the distance caused when Beckett raises
again the fourth wall. The audience gets involved in the play
yet not spontaneously in an authentic scene; rather, through a
disorientation that verges on malaise. Becketts anti-illusionism
emerges from a radical distance between stage and audience,
which becomes most evident in the attitude of the Beckettian actor.
The actor playing Clov, like Winnie in Happy Days, never sees
the audience, unlike the Brechtian actor who looks the audience
straight in the eyes. The distance between stage and audience
does not arise from passages between illusion and reality. It is the
character who operates within different registers, without giving
primacy to any of them, making the play autonomous in relation
to any other ctitious representation; it is taken as an autonomous
situation and not an artice destined to represent, explain or
criticize another text, whether literary or social. The result is not,
however, the erasure of the differences between theatre and the
empirical world, as a more simplistic vision of the post-dramatic
theatre would intend, but the construction of a space in which this
difference is exposed.
Beckett makes this theatricality indiscernible from the way in
which the question of the end permeates the relationship between
Clov and Hamm. It is possible to argue that Hamm relates in a
more intimate way with this theme when he seeks fullment as
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 233
the narrator of a novel whose fragments are relayed to Clov as
well as to his parents. If the theme of the end also characterizes his
concern for physical existence, suggesting a convergence between
death and the end, it is only congured as the fundamental theme
of his lines when it is projected onto the conclusion of a chronicle
that is in progress:
Hamm: Ive got on with my story. [Pause.] Ive got on with it
well. [Pause. Irritably.] Ask me where Ive got to.
Clov: Oh, by the way, your story?
Hamm: [Surprised.] What story?
Clov: The one youve been telling yourself all your . . . days.
Hamm: Ah you mean my chronicle?
Clov: Thats the one.
[. . . ]
Hamm: Ill tell you how it goes. He comes crawling on his
belly [. . . ]. Crawling on his belly, whining for bread for his
brat. Hes offered a job as gardener. [. . . ] I continue then. Before
accepting with gratitude he asks if he may have his little boy
with him. (Beckett, 1990, 1212)
These lines characterize Hamm as a producer of meaning. His
storytelling, which does not seem to distinguish memory from
invention, aims to organize his experience. Crowned by the end
which connects the whole and the parts, its narrative intelligibility
becomes an effective counterpoint to the alleged purposelessness
of his existence in the shelter. As Christoph Menke points out:
Hamms literary condensation of language deals with the
formation of meaning. His law is completion; his novel, his
story can only be nished when all reckoning is over. In an
effort to reach it, he is driven to replicate the experience that
Nagg points to in his joke about the tailor who, through his
work of art a pair of trousers seeks to confront the worlds
imperfection, but fails. Thus, all meaning making refers back to
234 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
an exterior that it must be capable of bringing in but is never
truly able to. In the narrative in which Hamm tells his story,
it is the uncontrollable exterior of his own memories (Menke,
2005, 195).
His chronicle thus seeks to integrate Clov into his own story. The
tale about a man who begs for bread for his sick child and gets an
offer to work as a gardener and care for his child could very well be
the story of Clovs entrance into Hamms domain. The chronicle
attributes the role of son to Clov, reinforcing his subordination. It
also gives a meaningful purpose to their relationship in the shelter.
Beckett, however, gives no textual evidence to conrmor refute this
hypothesis. It remains an unilateral effort to put Clov at Hamms
service.
Moreover, the relation of Hamms story to the issue of the end
is congured entirely by its oral features. Hamm does not write a
novel, but performs an oral narrative. He uses four different voice
registers to tell the story of the beggar, requiring different gestures
and body positions, as well as comments on the effects obtained.
This relation between narration and performance seals Hamms
dependence on theatrical conventions. The most important is the
audience.
Clov: Ill leave you.
Hamm: No!
Clov: What is there to keep me here?
Hamm: The dialogue. (Beckett, 1990, 1201)
Just as the need for an interlocutor is understood as theatrical
convention, dependence on Clov is also a link to the theatrical
environment in which the conict between Hamm and Clov arises.
There is a linguistic dependence between them, as dened by
Menke, but it is not restricted to the realm of verbal language. Since
his narrative is impossible unless it is enacted, he depends on more
than the dialogue with Clov in order to narrate. There are at least
two reasons for the interdependence of narration and enactment.
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 235
First, in a way that is immanent to narrative, there is the need for
an external perspective to conrm the meaning of events:
Hamm: I wonder. [Pause.] Imagine if a rational being came
back to earth, wouldnt he be liable to get ideas into his
head if he observed us long enough. [Voice of rational being.]
Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what
theyre at! [. . . ] And without going so far as that, we ourselves
. . . [with emotion] . . . we ourselves . . . at certain moments
. . . [Vehemently.] To think perhaps it wont all have been for
nothing! (Beckett, 1990, 108).
Furthermore, there is another reason, one which is perhaps even
more important: the staged narration cannot be explained as the
verbal explication of the narratives own engendering; much more
than this, it corresponds to the possibility of projecting the end
beyond the drama or the narration, that is, to a point in which
the end might nally be determined, namely, the end of the play.
If there is any hope for an end to his story, from which he might
acquire some sense of the whole, this seems to depend on its
onstage consummation. The staging, however, offers no resolution,
but is frozen into a tableau. This is followed by the plays end and
the promise of another performance. Thus it is understandable that
Hamm complains of the repetition which forces him to return to
the stage. In spite of this, he gives in to theatrical conventions,
hoping that some day the conclusion of his story might coincide
with the end of the play. Therefore, in his last lines he takes up
the link between beginning and end again before nally covering
his face with his handkerchief. He accepts the rules of the game
before action is suspended by the tableau. That is why, in his last
line, he returns to the link between beginning and end before nally
covering his face with the rag.
Hamm: Me to play. [Pause. Wearily.] Old endgame lost of old,
play and lose and have done with losing. [. . . ] Clov! [Long
pause.] No? Good. [He takes out the handkerchief.] Since thats
the way were playing it . . . [he unfolds handkerchief] . . . lets
play it that way . . . [he unfolds] . . . and speak no more about
236 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
it . . . [he nishes unfolding] . . . speak no more. [He holds the
handkerchief spread out before him.] Old stancher! [Pause.] You
. . . remain. [Pause. He covers his face with handkerchief, lowers his
arms to armrests, remains motionless.]
[Brief tableau.] (Beckett, 1990, 1324)
In the expectation of concluding his story, Hamm, actor-character-
narrator, accepts the rules of the game as laid down by Clov,
who observes him, immobile, dressed to go out, before the play is
suspended in a long tableau. By resorting to theatrical conventions,
Hamm enacts his ctional impulse in the expectation that one
day, ending and meaning will coincide. He does not reach the
completion of his novel, but this game gives him some hope that
indeed he might.
While Hamm needs the help of a listener to conceive his novel,
Clov stays in the refuge for other reasons:
Hamm: Why do you stay with me?
Clov: Why do you keep me?
Hamm: Theres no one else.
Clov: Theres nowhere else. (Beckett, 1990, 95)
Clov is closely connected to scenic space. There is no other
reason why Becketts Schiller Theater production concentrated its
efforts on Clov: he is the theatrical element in Endgame. If Hamm
is the literary component, the effort to construct the mythos as a
unit of a multiplicity, Clov resists meaning, opposing it with his
physical posture on stage. Beckett highlighted the stages resistance
to meaning by constructing for Clov what might be called the
choreography of disobedience. In his choreographic movement around
the stage, he resists the role Hammimposes on himin his story. This
choreography certainly revisits elements of the text itself, that is, of
Clovs and Hamms constitution as dramatic characters connected
through dialogue, but it bestows a new arrangement on them by
submitting them to a precise positioning within the composition of
the stage.
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 237
In Endgame, the very conguration of the dialogue presents
elements that go way beyond the transmission of meanings. Clov
mobilizes operations of meaning sabotage against Hamms narrative.
In his lines, words are not taken as bearers of meaning, but literally
as linguistic material, given their sonority and thus emptying the
communicative potential of the language. The word is at times
given back as an emptied sign, and at other times treated as raw
material. In his production, Beckett used such materiality in order
to produce parallelisms and sound or rhythmic analogies between
lines and distinct situations. In this use of language, Menke nds
not only the struggle between language practitioners between
Hamm the poet and Clov the avant-garde prosaist but also the
reason the link between them is maintained.
If Clovs prose is nothing but his war on Hamms poetry, it can
neither put an end to that war nor subsist independently of it.
[. . . ] Like his prose, and yes, through it, Clov is tied forever
to his secondary status; he lives off his cues. In the same way
that Hamm can neither tell his story to the end nor tell it
alone, Clov, eternally giving off cues, cannot speak without
Hamms support, and because of that, cannot leave him.
Clov, the clown, will always be Clov, the servant. [. . . ] While
Clovs prose presumes his opposite, since it only exists in this
struggle, Hamms poetry seeks to integrate and dominate its
opposite. For the two positions, however, something similar
applies albeit in different ways: in the struggle against one
another they resolve the antagonism that they respectively
are. Thus, both positions reproduce what they ght against:
not only the master reproduces the servants resistance, but
the servant reproduces his own dependence and his lack of
autonomy (Menke, 2005, 197200).
The dialogue may not only impede the dissolution of the link
between Clov and Hamm, but also any change or inversion of roles.
The reduction of conict to the linguistic dimension demands, in
the end, its solution, yet it seems that Beckett has already dismissed
such an outcome. Even if his thesis of the sabotage of meaning
claries the content of the dialogues between Hamm and Clov,
238 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
disregard for other dimensions of conict erodes the plausibility
of Menkes reading. Becketts staging work gains brief mention
in a reference to the beauty of the game of symmetries. In fact, it
is precisely Clovs physical and spatial resistance to Hamm that
his direction highlights, not to mention the fact that language
itself depends on the material elements of the congured scene.
Since Clovs sabotage is not restricted to his lines, but is exercised,
overall, by the corporeal mobilization of onstage space, Menkes
conclusions need to be relativized.
As at least three modications of the text show, Becketts
direction highlights the physical mechanisms of subversion
available to Clov. First, Beckett increases the distance between Clov
and Hamm so that the former no longer remains close to Hamms
chair, but halfway between it and the door to his kitchen. Second,
Beckett expands the repertoire of situations of disobedience. They
are not only verbal, as in the lie about the colour or the position
of the dog. Clov also lies about his own movements inside the
refuge, disobeying, for instance, Hamms order to move to the wall
and back. He stands beside Hamm, not taking a step, counting
time noisily while he conrms the enactment of a displacement
that never happened (Beckett, 1990, 95; Gontarski, 1992, 6). Finally,
Beckett enhances the violence of his movements. After pushing
Hamm around the stage in his chair (an act the idealist Hamm sees
as a trip around the world), Clov returns him to centre stage:
Hamm: I feel a little too far to the left. [CLOV moves chair
slightly.] Now I feel a little too far to the right. [CLOV moves
chair slightly.] Now I feel a little too far forward. [CLOV moves
chair slightly.] Now I feel a little too far back. [CLOV moves chair
slightly.] Dont stay there [i. e. behind the chair], you give me
the shivers.
[CLOV returns to his place beside the chair.] (Beckett, 1990, 105)
During rehearsals, Beckett replaced slightly with a sequence
of rhythmic and aggressive thumps against Hamms chair
(Gontarski, 1992, 556). This has a considerable effect on the scene,
as it enhances Clovs weapons against Hamm: physical, sound and
gesture elements belonging to the realm of the stage.
5
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 239
In his function as stager, Beckett turns the text into a musical
score for the execution of these theatrical devices. His work
with the materiality of the scene mobilizes rhythms, repetitions,
symmetries, regularities and correspondences against the effort
towards a resolution that is inscribed onto Hamms history. The
play is full of echoes. They all answer each other, Beckett explained
to the cast (Gontarski, 1992, xxi).
6
Clovs movement between
his kitchen and Hamms chair should always occur in the same
way, as a dance exercise that is always repeated in the same
rhythm in such a way that his movements are always symmetric:
Clovs thinking walk, for instance, is choreographed into
a 6+4+6+4 pattern. Such patterns, perceived at the subconscious
level through repetition, are like subliminal images in lm. At one
point in rehearsals, Beckett called such patterning Pythagorean
(Gontarski, 1992, 55).
7
This choreography goes beyond an interest in pantomime which,
in Clovs initial movements, pushes theatre towards an art of
silence. It also serves as a separation between language and action.
8
To those involved in the production of Endgame in Berlin, Beckett
said: Never let your changes of position and voice come together.
First comes (a) the altered bodily stance; after it, following a
slight pause, comes (b) the corresponding utterance (Gontarski,
1992, xix). It is not an issue of seeking mind/body dualities, but
of exploiting the intervals between text and acting, producing a
succession of postures and frozen moments, as if the play should
progress in a pictorial mode, frame by frame, until it is suspended
in the nal tableau in which Hamm again covers his face while Clov,
dressed to leave, observes him without participating in the scene
or modifying the image produced. As the plays producer states,
over and over, he has them [the actors] freeze for seconds at a
time into a tableau which is to achieve its effect through repetition
(Gontarski, 1992, xx).
Repetition against resolution: Beckett emphasized the symmetry
of beginning and end so as to keep Hamm from concluding his
story, and Clov from reaching a permanent immobilization of
scenic resources and meeting the ideal he dreamed of: one of
order and repose. Immobilized through an image that promises
repetition, Hamm and Clov decipher the very theatrical experience
of which they are part. In the struggle between drama and theatre,
240 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
between sense and scene, Hamm performs the role of not liberating
the stage from the effort of producing meaning, as obsolete and
vacated as it may be. Clov, in turn, must resist the scenes xation
through meaning previously organized by the text. There is no end
for Hamms effort to produce a meaningful story, as his narration
needs the audience that repeatedly sabotages his efforts to produce
meaning by confronting him with the semantic openness of scenic
material. There is no end for Clov either, since his aimof permanent
immobilization of the stage cannot develop without the struggle
against Hamms obsolete though non-removable effort to produce
meaning. Without Clov, or rather, without theatre, Hamm might
not be more than a traditionalist withdrawal in the face of the
radical push of The Unnamable. The theatre was the way in which
Beckett chose to resume the problem of how to narrate and
take it beyond the impasse he faced upon conclusion of his prose
trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable). The theatricality
of the conict between Clov and Hamm gave visual and sound
materiality to the narrative problem, using the scenic and the
bodily to develop the conict between words and silence.
Endgame cannot be deciphered, however, through a single
narrative issue. The conict with the literary dimension of Hamms
character also allowed the traditions of pantomime and clowning
to be preserved without pushing the play toward a theatre of
pure physicality. Deprived of the search for Hamms literary
meaning, Clov might succumb to the shock of the scenic material,
much like the character of Act Without Words I, conceived by
Beckett as an appendix to Endgame. Adorno interpreted Act I
as the legitimate consequence of the play: its telos is silence. It
might be more appropriate to nd in Act I a counterpoint to
Endgame: the pantomime might present a Clov deprived of his
conict with literary language, which would reduce him to the
status of victim of the scenic apparatus. In contrast with the
postdramatic apology of the scene, Endgame as theatrical praxis,
sustains an irresolvable conict with the vestiges of an epic-
dramatic conception of meaning. Since the openness of meaning
permeates scenic organization, there would be also no reason to
use the nal tableau to draw conclusions regarding the failure of
mediation between aesthetics and practical life, as intended in
recent re-statements on the autonomy of drama.
Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 241
In a scenario within which traditional resolutions are a
wasteland, Endgame makes conict the very raison dtre of
theatrical experience. This, however, does not guarantee synthesis
of meaning and performance. The presentation of conict
sabotages its outcome, projected onto Clovs departure, and
suggests that non-resolution itself is Clovs strongest weapon
against Hamm, the idealist. By playing with the semantic
indeterminacy of scenic material, Clov makes an effort to keep
open the experience that Hamm seeks to circumscribe through the
use of words. On the other side of the fourth wall, the audience
is confronted with a unique conception of theatrical experience.
It does not return home with a message on practical life, nor is it
invited to subscribe to a particular diagnosis of the world in which
we live. The scenic apparatus does not captivate the audience
through its senses. By dispensing with the spectators intellectual
and affective engagement with the play, Beckett merely seeks to
circumscribe the social reach of his theatre: to build a moment of
freedom in relation to the previous determination of meaning. The
hermetic quality of the last tableau should be understood in the light
of audience receptiveness to this experience of disorientation.
NOT E S
1. Early reviews are collected in Graver (1979) and Andonian (1998). For
a more comprehensive discussion of Becketts reception, see Boxall (2003).
2. All translations of quotations from Menke are my own.
3. Cf. Menke, 2004, 33: In avant-garde theatre, the experience of failure
of the game in praxis is involuntarily exposed. [. . . ] What is shown
involuntarily in theatre can also become voluntary: the failure of the
theatrical game in praxis may become the object and content of the
theatrical game. This happens, for instance, when Clov acts the avant-
gardist subversion strategies to the point of self-paralysis [. . . ]. In those
post-avant-gardist forms of theatre, the failure of the historical avant-garde
movements to mediate (in a more or less dialectic way) game and praxis
is not presumed, but it becomes itself presented and enacted. Here, the
awareness of the insurmountable differences between praxis and theatre is
acquired at the very theatre.
4. The concept of theatricality is normally applied to emphasize self-
awareness of the theatrical game and its independence fromdrama as well.
242 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
It was not by chance that the concept acquired prominence in theatrical
theory, with the progressive conquest of the autonomy of presentation
over dramatic text. The term, as much as the experience to which it refers,
escapes unequivocal identication, and must be better understood as the
effort to circumscribe various processes of theatrical situation composition:
physical presence of the actor, association of spectator to play production,
autonomy of the arts in scene composition, relations between stage and
audience, mimesis and illusion, between performance and ction, etc.
5. All of the elements of the staging presented up to this point may be
noticed when Becketts production is compared with other available ones,
such as that of Conor McPherson for the project Beckett on lm, available on
DVD, and that of the San Quentin Drama Workshop for the project Beckett
directs Beckett (available at http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=901),
which attempted to recapture Becketts own direction. Becketts version,
the recording of which is available at the New York Public Library for
Performing Arts, presents a very different relationship between scene
and dramatic action. Of the three versions, Becketts is the only one
in which there is an effective rupture between Clovs attitude and his
psychological interior. Not only his movement, but his facial expressions
are entirely mediated by the relationship with the scene. Its difference from
the two other productions may be perceived in the remnants of a certain
expressiveness or a certain psychological interior in Clov, whether in the
externalization of his internal suffering and rebellion in the production for
Beckett on Film or in the perplexity of the San Quentin Drama Workshop
staging. These vestiges of Clovs interior dimension were eliminated in the
Clov that emerged under Becketts own direction.
6. On the issue of sounds in Endgame, cf. Barry McGovern (2009).
7. The same symmetry appears in Hamms rst and last lines. In the
Berlin diaries, he states: The voice comes out of silence and returns into
silence (Gontarski, 1992, 69).
8. As indicated by Anna McMullan (1994), this would become the
central mark in Becketts direction work for his late plays.
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Literature V. I, New York: Columbia University Press.
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Choreography of Disobedience: Becketts Endgame 243
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