Background info of Endgame

(All information came from the attachment)

Director:

Why chose to direct Endgame?

All those things you associate with Beckett – codependent couples, the manipulation of time on stage, specific but ultimately indeterminable locations, searingly memorable imagery, a preoccupation with bodily functions, aging and death, a tragicomic humor in despair – are expressed in a very pure and distilled form in Endgame. Also, Endgame manages all this while still being a play written in relatively recognizable dramatic form and length, unlike Beckett’s later short work. 

Plot:

CHARACTERS 

Hamm – unable to stand, blind
Clov – servant of Hamm, unable to sit
Nagg – Hamm’s father, without legs, lives in a dustbin 

Nell – Hamm’s mother, without legs, lives in a dustbin 

CAST 

Colin Friels
Luke Mullins
Rhys McConnochie Julie Forsyth

Mix of comedy and tragedy. Four characters live in a little room outside is the dead world.  Hamm sits on the wheelchair for the whole play. And his step-son Clov serves him with broken leg. Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell live inside the garbage bin. It describes an endless world with dark and weird atmosphere. 

Theme:

Endgame is a play in one act. There is a clear beginning and end to the play. Between those two points, the dialogue concerns the interactions and musings of the four characters who inhabit the world. 

Theater style:

Samuel Beckett’s plays are generally considered to sit within the theatre tradition known as ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. The following two sources seek to explain what is meant by this theatrical movement. 

Endgame is performed in a proscenium arch configuration in The Sumner which allows both the set and the actors to be framed within the playing space. The Sumner is a very contemporary proscenium arch theatre, quite different in design and aesthetic to other proscenium arch theatres you may have been to such as The Regent, Her Majesty’s or The Princess. 

Background information of the play:

During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers. However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one. Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and concerned about Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical, blood-thirsty rule of his own country. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians. After the war ended, these grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity. Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as American officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and interventionist approach to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.