SAMUEL BECKETT’S

ENDGAME

Hilal Başak Gölçek

 TABLE OF
CONTENTS Antonin Artaud
Theatre of cruelty
Theatre of the absurd
Samuel Beckett
Endgame
Works Cited
Antonin Artaud (1896 –
1948)
■ French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist,
actor, theatre director.
■ One of the major figures of twentieth century theatre
and the European avant – garde
■ Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive themes.
■ Notable work: The Theatre and Its Double
■ Between 1931 and 1936 he formulated a theory called
Theatre of Cruelty
■ Conventional theatre at the time was geared toward
the elite and bourgeoisie, looked to imitate real life.
But Artaud wanted theatre for the masses, something
that would change the way the audience experienced
the theatre.
■ Artaud believed that civilization had turned humans into sick and repressed creatures and that
the true function of the theatre was to rid humankind of these repressions and liberate each
individual’s instinctual energy.
■ He proposed removing the barrier of the stage between performers and audience and
producing mythic spectacles that would include verbal incantations, groans, screams,
pulsating lighting effects and oversized stage puppets and props.
■ Artaud’s Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté (1932; “Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty“)
and Le Théâtre et son double (1938; “The Theatre and Its Double) call for a communion
between actor and audience in a magic exorcism; gestures, sounds, unusual scenery, and
lighting combine to form a language, superior to words, that can be used to subvert thought
and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world.
■ “His best known publication, The Theatre
and Its Double consists of a preface, ten
essays (most of them originally given as
lectures), seven letters and two notes, a
gathering that does not have an inevitable
sequence and is far from being a sustained
argument or a book; rather, it resembles in
format those collections of columns by
reviewers that bunch up their opinions
under some noncommittal but catchy title.
■ What we call his works, then, is a large
number of fragments; in turn these
fragments are urgently suggestive, not
ordered in a formally correct manner, for
Artaud had no use for accepted forms;
they distract the theatre from it’s true
artistic ends.
■ ‘If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing
in our time, it is our artistic dallying with
forms, instead of being like victims burnt
at the stake, signaling through the flames.”
(Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, p.
13)
■ Artaud believed that the contemporary theatre,
especially in its staging of the classics, should employ
means that were ‘immediate and direct, corresponding to
present modes of feeling, and understandable to
everyone’s, as well as being in consonance with ‘the
rude and epileptic rhythm of our time’
■ The kind of theatre Adtaud envisaged would use the
classical but only after subjecting them to a radical
overhaul. Lighting, sound equipment and other technical
means would no longer subserve the text; they would
partially replace it. The noises, music and colors that
generally accompany the lines would in places substitute
for them. They would be fortified by a range of human
noises – screams, grunts, moans, sighs, yelps – together
with a repertoire of gestures, signs and other movements.
These would extend the range of the actor’s art and the
receptivity of the spectator. To put it another way, they
would enlarge the theatre’s vocabulary.
■ It might then deal more comprehensively than ever
before with irrational states of being and understanding.
Through the new acting and directing techniques the
unconscious minds of the director and actors would
speak to the unconscious mind of each spectator.
 Theatre of Cruelty (Théâtre De La
■Cruauté)
It is a form of theatre generally associated with Antonin Artaud.
■ Aimed to shock audiences through gesture, image, sound and lighting.
■ Peter Brook, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet were influenced by Artaud’s ideas.
■ Artaud wanted to disrupt the relationship between the audience and the performer.
■ The cruelty was sensory, it exists in the work’s capacity to shock and confront the
audience, to go beyond words and connect with the emotions: to wake up the nerves and
the heart.
■ The screams, cries and other noises that were the focus of the Theatre of Cruelty meant
to jar the mind and make people face their fears.
■ Artaud believed gesture and movement to be more powerful than text.
■ The audience should be placed at the centre of a piece of performance. Theatre should
be an act of “organised anarchy”
■ “A primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to
himself”. (Britannica)
■ Antonin Artaud believed theatre relied too heavily on written word and realism. His style relied on
energetic and physical performances. (Tourelle & McNamara: 1998)
■ Artaudian Techniques
■ Visual Poetry – movement, gesture and dance instead of word to communicate; used music, sound
effects. Stylized movement. Emotional impact.
■ Creating a dream world- use of ritual, masks, tradition and striking costumes; no scenery just symbolic
objects; combines with movement, lights and music - affect the emotional subconscious like dreams.
■ Assaulting the audience (using lights, music, sounds, images. Be shocked into confronting themselves.
■ Involving the audience (action would take place all around them, audience would feel part of the
action. To ensure that the audience was completely immersed in the action Artaud wanted them to sit
in swivel chairs in the middle of the performance.)
■ Skills of an actor – use of the body and voice; total commitment; emotionally involved in their work
and convinced of the truth of it.
■ Deliberate cruelty – attack on the emotions. Designed to shock and totally involve them. Use of
violent, terrifying and shocking actions and images.
■ Les Cenci (1935), Artaud‘s play about a man who rapes
his own daughter and is then murdered by men the girl
hires to eliminate him typifies Artaud’s theatre of
[Link] was closed after seventeen dismal
performances.
■ His plays were designed to challenge conventional,
civilized values and bring out the natural, barbaric
instincts Artaud felt lurked beneath the refined, human
facade.
■ For Artaud, theatre is a practice which “wakes us up.
Nerves and heart,” and through which we experience
“immediate violent action” that “inspires us with the
fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a
spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be
forgotten.”
THEATRE OF CRUELTY
THEATRE
OF THE
ABSURD
(THÉÂTRE
DE
L’ABSURDE)
■ Date: c. 1950 – c. 1965
■ The origins of the Theatre of the Absurd are rooted in the avant garde experiments in art of the 1920s and
1930s.
■ Was heavily influenced by existential philosophy ( human beings do not have any intrinsic purpose other than
what they make for themselves) and the traumatic experience of the horrors of the World War II.
■ It was an era of spiritual emptiness. Following the atrocities of World War II, to some the world itself had
become absurd: a frightening and illogical place in which life had lost all meaning and human existence
seemed futile.
■ “Theatre of the Absurd tends to be a reflection of the attitude at the time it was written” (Esslin 22 – 23).
■ The Theatre of the Absurd is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin for the work of a number of playwrights,
mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. The term is derived from an essay by Albert Camus. In his Myth of
Sisyphus, written in 1942, he first defined the human situation as basically meaningless and absurd.
■ Examines the fundamental absurdity of choosing to live one’s life normally when confronted with an uncaring
and meaningless universe. Absurdist plays recontextualize these two aspects of existence, presenting the
characters as either behaving routinely in absurd situations or any combination of the two.
■ Many of the European playwrights associated with this movement including Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco,
Jean Genet rejected the phrase. These men saw themselves as individual artists, not members of a collective,
and viewed their plays as nothing more than an expression of their personal vision of the world. They
sometimes preferred to use terms like “Anti Theatre” or “New Theatre"
■ Although the Theatre of the Absurd is often traced back to avant garde experiments of the 1920s and 1930s,
its roots date back much further. Absurd elements first made appearance shortly after the rise of Greek
drama, in the wild humor and buffoonery of Old Comedy and the plays of Aristophanes in particular. They
were further developed in the late classical period by Lucian, Petronius and Apuleius, in Menippean satire, a
tradition of carnivalistic literature, depicting “a world upside down.”
■ The morality plays of the Middle Ages may be considered a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd,
depicting everyman type characters dealing with allegorical and sometimes existential problems.
■ During the nineteenth century, absurd elements may be noted in certain plays in Ibsen and more obviously
Strindberg.
■ The Theatre of the Absurd was also anticipated in the dream novels of James Joyce and Franz Kafka who
created archetypes by delving into their own subconscious and exploring universal, collective significance
of their own private obsessions.
■ After World War II, one did not need to be an abstract thinker in order to be able to reflect upon absurdity:
The experience of absurdity became part of the average person’s daily existence. During this period,
Antonin Artaud appeared. And he called for a return to myth and magic and to the exposure of the deepest
conflicts within the human mind. The Theatre of the Absurd is precisely the new theatre that Artaud was
dreaming of.
■ It openly rebelled against conventional theatre. It was as Ionesco called it
“anti theatre”. It was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless.
■ The dialogue often seemed to be complete gibberish.
■ Anxiety, isolation, futility are common themes.
■ The public’s first reaction to this new theatre was incomprehension and
rejection.
■ Distrust of language as a means of communication. Language has
become nothing but a vehicle for conventionalized, stereotyped,
meaningless exchanges.
■ Subverts logic. It relishes the unexpected and the logically impossible.
■ Aims to create a ritual like, mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision,
closely related to the world of dreams. The focal point of these dreams is
often man’s fundamental bewilderment and confusion, stemming from
the fact that he has no answers to the basic existential questions: Why we
are alive, why we have to die, why there is injustice and suffering.
■ Ionesco defined the absurdist everyman as “Cut off from his religious,
metaphysical, and transcendental roots… lost; all this actions become
senseless, absurd, useless.”
■ The Theatre of the Absurd, in a sense, attempts to reestablish man’s
communion with the universe.
 Characteristics
■ Unexplained, vague ending
■ No organized movement
■ Nonsensical language
■ Comedic but dark
■ Lack of plot
■ Confused characters
■ Meaningless existence
■ Lack of definite characterization
■ Incoherent babbling makes up the dialogue,
■ Humanity’s vain struggle against fate
■ No action,
■ Vagueness about time, place and the characters.
■ Extensive use of pauses, silences, repetitions, miming, farcical situations which reflect a sense of anguish.
■ Intends to shock the audience
■ Minimalistic
Samuel Beckett (1906 –
1989)
■ Irish novelist, playwright, theater director, poet,
literary translator.
■ He wrote both in French and English
■ Author of Waiting For Godot, Endgame, Happy Days,
Krapp’s Last Tape
■ Was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature (1969)
■ One of the last modernist writers and one of the key
figures in the Theatre of the Absurd.
■ Most prominent themes in his plays: the passage of
time, its inevitability, its end, the overlap of past and
present, use of words and language, emptiness, futility
of existence
■ Beckett’s first two published plays constitute a crux, a pivotal moment in the development of
modern Western theatre. In refusing both the psychological realism of Chekhov, Ibsen and
Strindberg and the pure theatricality of the body advocated by Artaud, they stand a
significant transitional works as well as major works in themselves. The central problem they
pose is what language can do and cannot do. Language is no longer presented as a vehicle for
direct communication or as a screen through which one can see darkly the psychic
movements of a character. Rather it is used in all its grammatical, syntactic and – especially
- intertextual force to make the reader/ spectator aware of how much we depend on language
and of how much we need to be wary of the modifications that language imposes on us.
(Worton, Michael. “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: theater as a text.” The Cambridge
Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling, Cambeidge University Press, 1994, 67 - 87.)
■ His first plays mark the transition from Modernism with its preoccupation with self reflection
to Postmodernism with its insistence on pastiche, paradox and fragmentation.
■ Instead of following the tradition which demands that a play have an exposition, a climax
and a dénouement, Beckette’s plays have cyclical structure which might indeed be better
described as a diminishing spiral. They present images of entropy in which the world and the
people in it are slowly but inexorably running down. In this spiral descending towards a final
closure that can never be found in the Beckettian universe, the characters take refuge in
repetition, repeating their own actions and words often those of others – in order to pass time.
‘Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch), The encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (London:
Collier – Macmillan, 1967), 532.
Endgame (Fin de partie)
■ Originally written in French ■ Themes: Loneliness and Pain ● Work of
Language ● Search for Meaning, Repetitive Nature
■ Genre: tragicomedy, drama,
of Beginnings and Endings ● Meaning, Narrative,
theater of the Absurd
Engagement ● Time, Peogress, Stasis ● Misery and
■ First performed: 1957 Suffering ● Companionship, Dependency,
■ Characters: Compassion ● Isolation
■ Hamm
■ Motifs: Chess ● Theatre ● Death
■ Clov
■ Nagg ■ Symbols: Light and Darkness ● Youth ● Hamm’s
painkillers ● The Bloody Handkerchief
■ Nell
 Symbols
The Painkillers The Bloody
■ painkillers are an embodiment of the fact
that Hamm is waiting in vain for something
to happen that will ease his suffering. In the
Handkerchief
■ The bloody handkerchief represents pain but it is
also a symbol of habit for Hamm uses it to wipe
his black glasses. It becomes a part of his routine.
play, Hamm repeatedly asks for his The fact that Hamm is blind but he still wipes his
painkillers but Clov repeatedly tells him that glasses seems to be a habit that reminds him of the
it is not the time yet. When he finally agrees times when he could see.
that it is time for the painkillers, he tells ■ Hamm develops an attachment to the
Hamm that there are no more painkillers. Handkerchief, calling it “old stancher” and at the
Painkillers represent the fact that the end saying “Old stancher! [Pause.] You… remain.”
suffering is inescapable and is an unavoidable ■ The handkerchief also symbolizes his desire to
have something to rely upon.
part of being alive.
 Character names
■ Nell is homophonous to nail.
■ Hamm is a short from of hammer.
■ The word Nag is from German “Nagel” that stands for nail
■ Clov is a french word for nail.

■ All characters are meant to rebuild the society but cannot because of lack of harmony
and coordination. They refuse to reconstruct the family and society. Their failure to
reconstruct is the failure of modern human society.

Death of Nell: She is the only female character in the play. Her last word is “desert”. Her death
represents her success to escape from the futile life.
Themes
Companionship,
dependency, compassion
■ HAMM: Why do you stay with me?
HAMM: […] Can there be misery—
[he yawns]
—loftier than mine? No doubt. Formerly. But now?
■ CLOV: Why do you keep me?
[Pause.]
■ HAMM: There’s no one else. My father?
[Pause.]
■ CLOV: There’s nowhere else. (Pause.)
My mother?
[Pause.]
My…dog?
NAGG: […] Yes, I hope I’ll live till then, to hear you [Pause.]
calling me like when you were a tiny boy, and were Oh I am willing to believe they suffer as much as such
frightened, in the dark, and I was your only hope. creatures can suffer. But does that mean their
sufferings equal mine? No doubt.
■ Hamm’s toy dog
■ There is an abiding concern with death and dying, but death as an event is presented as
desired bu ultimately impossible, whereas dying as a process is shown to be our only
sure reality. Beckett’s characters are haunted by ‘the sin of having been born’ (PTD, 67),
a sin which they can never expiate.
■ Death as a final ending, as a final silence, is absent from the plays. The characters must
go on waiting for what will never come, declining into old age and the senility which
will make of them helpless, dependent – but decrepit - children again, as exemplified
by Nagg in Endgame who asks plaintively for “Me pap” (E,15).
■ The title of Endgame with its references to chess, articulates a powerful sense of waiting
as reality and as a metaphor for infinity.
■ “Hamm is a king in this chess game lost from the start. From the start he knows he is
making loud senseless moves. That he will make no progress at all with the gaff. Now at
the last he makes a few senseless moves as only a bad player would. A good one would
have given up long ago. He is only trying to delay the inevitable end. Each of his
gestures is one of the last useless moves which put off the end. He is a bad player.”
■ It is crucial that Hamm is conceived as a king in a chess game. When two kings are left
on the board (this is possible only when bad players are playing), they can never end the
game but merely engage in an infinite series of movements around the chess board.
■ Clov is a king as well as a pawn. This inference accords with the fact that their
relationship is one of master and slave/ servant. Although the master has social
superiority, the servant is actually more powerful, since he is more necessary to the
master than vice versa. Thus Clov is stronger than Hamm because he makes his
existence possible.
■ All of Beckett’s pairs are bound in friendships that are power relationships. Each partner
needs to know that the other is there: the partners provide proof that they really exist by
responding and replying to each other.
■ The time is always “The same as usual” (E, 13). In fact, time does not pass in this world;
rather characters have to find ways of passing the time. One solution is mechanical
repetition, re-enacting situations without perceiving any significance in these repeated
actions.
■ Amnesia heightens their anxiety. According to Beckett:

The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of

habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual
and his environment. […] the guarantee of a dull
inviolability, the lightning conductor of his existence. Habit
is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is
habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits,
since the individual is a succession of individuals […] The
creation of the world did not take place once and for all
time, but takes place every day.
(PTD, 18-19)

■ in other words, time indubitably exist as a force of which characters

are aware in that they become increasingly decrepit, but they have no
sense of its continuity. If each day is like all the others, how can they
know that time is really passing and that an end is nigh?

Endgame is the promise of a departure that never happens.

■ Seeing the play as a departure that never happens would imply that the characters look
forward to the future, yet if there is no past, there can be neither present nor future, so in
order to be able to project onto an unlocatable- and perhaps non existent – future , the
characters need to invent a past for themselves. And this they do by inventing stories. In
Endgame the past is regarded with nostalgia:

NELL: [elegiac]. Ah yesterday!

HAMM: She [Mother Pegg] was bonny once, like a flower of the field. [With
reminiscent leer.] And a great one for the men!

CLOV: We too were bonny – once. It’s a rare thing not to have been
bonny – once.

Crucially, the various stories are never really finished – and they are told not only to give the teller a belief that he
or she does in fact have a past but, more importantly, to convince a listener that a past, or at least their past, exists.
Failure is the inevitable outcome – even the punch lines of their jokes fail to be understood. The reason is that none
of these would be autobiographers can believe that in their own tales or even invent plausible accounts. Hamm may
redefine his sotu as “my chronicle”, that is to say, as a factual account (E, 40); however, like everyone else, he is
striving not to remember his past but to construct it.
Beckett said that Endgame is “rather difficult and elliptic, mostly
dependent on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than
Godot.”

Martin Esslin observes, we are “confronted with a very powerful

expression of the sense of deadness, of leaden heaviness and
hopelessness, that is experienced in states of deep depression: the
world outside goes dead for the victim of such states, but inside his
mind there is ceaseless argument between parts of his personality that
have become autonomous entities.”
Endgame as an example of the theatre of
the Absurd
Minimalism
Repetitions
Little or no action
COMEDIC BUT DARK
Extensive use of pauses
Meaningless existence, hopelessness,
decay
Well? Don't we laugh?
HAMM (after reflection): I don’t.
CLOV (after reflection): Nor I. (He gets up on ladder, turns the telescope on the without.) Let's see. (He
looks, moving the telescope.) Zero... (he looks)
...zero... (he looks) ...and zero.
HAMM: Nothing stirs. All is---
CLOV: Zer---
HAMM (violently): Wait till you’re spoken to! (Normal voice.) All is… all is… all is what? (Violently.) All
is what?
CLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment. (He turns the telescope on the
without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards Hamm.) Corpsed. (Pause.)
VAGUENESS ABOUT TIME
Nonsensical language
Unexplain
ed, vague
ending
■ “Moments for nothing,
now as always, time
was never and time is
over, reckoning closed
and story ended.”
Endgame as a text
Maybe they are waiting for the story to end?
Can we impose a fixed meaning to
Endgame?
The process of absorbing the play is a continual affirmation and negation of meaning; Endgame Iser says,
“compels the spectator to reject the ‘meaning’ it stimulates, and in this way conveys something of the
‘unendingness’ of the end and the nature of the fictions which we are continually fabricating in order to
finish off the end or to close the gaps in our experiences.”

We are in the theatre, where artifice and play acting are the convention by which we create meaning
through the interaction of the actors performing Hamm and Clov.

The play does not lack closure, it is a process of closing and opening: like a series of snapshots, we piece
together, montage- like, meanings that have to be revived when a new photo appears.
 Works Cited
■
Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
■ Bermel, Albert. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001. Print.
■ [Link], Encyclopedia Britannica, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater by Ruby Cohn, [Link]
■ Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Theatre of Cruelty". Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Mar. 2016, 
[Link] Accessed 25 December 2021.
■ Coe, Richard N., Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 1964.
■ Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Print.
■ ---. Samuel Beckett: a collection o critical essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965.
■ Lannamann, Taylor. “Endgame Symbols: The Bloody Handkerchief.” LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 25 Nov 2019. Web. 7 Aug 2021.
■ --- . “Endgame Symbols: Hamm’s Painkillers.” LitCharts. Litcharts LLC, 25 Nov 2019. Web. 7 Aug 2021.
■ Pilling, John, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
■ Quotations from essay ‘No More Masterpieces’, The Theatre and Its Double, pp. 74-78.
■
"Theatre of Cruelty: Artaud." [Link], 16 January 2014, [Link]/academy/lesson/[Link]
■ Worth, Katherine. “Beckett’s Divine Comedy.” A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880 - 2005, ed. Mary
Luckhurst., Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 237 – 246.
■ [Link]