“Endspiel” at Théâtre National de Luxembourg

Dana Rufolo in Luxembourg 
8 January, 2025

Under David Mouchtar-Samorai’s sensitive direction, Endspiel (Endgame) is spread out like a poem before our wondering eyes at the Théâtre national de Luxembourg (TNL) as a two-character play from which Hamm’s parents Nell and Nagg have been eliminated. It has none of the excess and exaggeration that plagued productions of this Samuel Beckett drama when it was produced in Germany during the reign of Regietheater. (I am thinking specifically of the Deutsches Theater Berlin’s 2007 production, with its loud costumes, swirls, twirls, magic incantations and puffs of powder). This is simple, clear, claustrophobic.
André Jung as Hamm.
Photo credit: Bohumil Kosthoryz.

Hamm and Clov live in a room that is round, sealed except for a single exit spiralling off to indicate that Clov has an off-stage kitchen. The set, designed by Heinz Hauser, is the world. Is there anything outside? We will never know for certain, although Clov tells Hamm that he is preparing to venture outside. The circular set has walls of white paper. The irony of being shut in by material that can easily be torn and yet seeing both Hamm and Clov respect these paper wall limitations, is intensified because the famous two windows which are integral to the play are mere drawings; they do not open, they do not close; they do not exist as windows but only as the idea of a window, reproduced twice.

Hamm is blind, and he wears the traditional dark sunglasses to announce this handicap. He is incapable of walking as well, and his chair has wheels only on the back legs, meaning that when Clov rides him around the room he is tipped backwards, looking helpless. And yet his acerbic command of their two lives is interminable, and he utters not a word of gratitude to Clov for slavishly attempting to please him.

The script Mouchtar-Samorai used is the approved German translation by Elmar Tophoven, published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Beckett didn’t know German nearly as well as he knew French, but nonetheless, he made sagacious comments on the translation and thus worked to some extent as a collaborator.

André Jung as Hamm and Ulrich Kuhlmann as Clov.
Photo credit: Bohumil Kosthoryz.

Both Hamm and Clov are played by celebrated German language theatre, TV and film actors. André Jung, Luxembourgish by birth, plays Hamm, and the German actor Ulrich Kuhlmann is Clov. Both are well over 70 years old, effacing the possibility entertained in the French or English script that they are father and son. In this interpretation, they are often physically in contact, playing at interdependency – like a clove stuck into a ham, another example of Beckett’s delightful habit of naming his characters after foods or herbs. Clov serves as Hamm’s eyes, legs and arms; he prepares the food Hamm eats, he takes Hamm for a ride around the room, allowing him to touch the wall and feel the limits of his world; he tolerates Hamm’s insults and orders. But his patience is thin, and he threatens repeatedly to leave, which he does after Hamm declares that Clov is no longer needed: “Wir sind am Ende. Ich brauche dich nicht mehr.”. (The original lines are: “It’s the end, Clov. we’ve come to the end. I don’t need you any more.”)

Mouchtar-Samorai shortened Endspiel by eliminating not only Hamm’s parents but also many ritualistic scenes between the two men that are repeated over and over again in the French and English versions (not unlike Philip Glass’s “Prelude to Endpsiel”, a 1983 composition with double bass and timpani, that began the TNL evening). The result is this production’s compact poetic quality. Not only this, but stripping away repetitiveness reduces the existential nihilism – its wading in the gelatinous forever-present – of the original Beckett play. It unexpectedly becomes a play with a movement forward, a plot. The movement pushing it forward to its climax, which occurs as the play ends, is Clov not just threatening to depart but finally taking action. He is leaving, suitcase in hand. Hamm lets out a scream of terror, the loudest sound in the quietly performed play which forces every audience member to remain still, listening intently. Hamm is defeated; he takes out his old-fashioned cloth handkerchief and covers his head. This is the closure we were set up to expect from the beginning of the play. We are happy that the long, almost interminable, wait is over. Somehow, there is cause for hope.