THEATRE REVIEW: Endgame, Liverpool Everyman

Apr 17 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Matthew Rixon and Matthew Kelly in Endgame at the Liverpool Everyman _320

YOU can understand why theatre people love Samuel Beckett. They must adore to play his larger-than-life characters, tackle his nonsense dialogue and play with all the theatrical trickery he gives them.

But it can be a hard haul for an audience and Endgame at the Everyman – even after 50 years – takes few prisoners.

You have to accept that there is a man who can’t stand up, a companion who can’t sit down and aged parents living in dustbins.

The dialogue is full of non sequiturs, conversations that lead nowhere and obscurity about what is going on outside the one room in which they all live.

Some have tried to make sense of it all, suggesting it as a post H-bomb scenario or simply a thesis on family relationships.

It is best just to let it all wash over you and come up with what you wish and this is a production that allows that to happen.

It has two fine central performances in Matthew Kelly – back in the theatre where his early career began – as the seated Hamm and his real-life son Matthew Rixon as the standing-up Clov. Kelly, in white beard and smoking cap, is seated in a chair with the stuffing falling out and is grumpy old man personified. Sometimes muttering, sometimes bellowing, it is a sustained characterisation that adds some reality to his weird and often repetitive conversation.

Rixon, in baggy pants that are too short, performs like a comedian from the silent film era with a Chaplineque waddle and an occasional Oliver Hardy stare at the audience. His opening wordless sequence with a step ladder is a brilliant piece of mime.

Ciaran McIntyre, as the father performing from inside a dustbin, adds a lot of fun, as does Tina Gray as his equally legless wife.

The grey set sets a suitably anonymous mood under Lucy Pitman-Wallace’s direction.

Brilliant theatre or nonsense? Make up your own minds.

philkey