Endgame and Rough for Theatre II
The Old Vic, London SE1 (0344-871 7628). Until 28 March Running time: 2hrs 15mins
★★★
Comparisons may be odious, but watching this unexciting revival of Endgame (1957), I couldn’t help but recall the “perfect” West End staging of 2004, starring Michael Gambon and Lee Evans, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Compared to that triumph, Richard Jones’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s bleakest play is thin gruel, the “gallows humour” lacking the necessary “mordant edge”. As Hamm, the play’s “querulous armchairbound kingpin”, Alan Cumming is all “feline self-possession” where he needs to be monstrous. And as Clov, the supposedly decrepit, hobbling servant, Daniel Radcliffe cannot overcome his “undisguisable youth”. Both actors acquit themselves “far better” as two other-worldly bureaucrats in the curtain-raiser on this Beckett double-bill, Rough for Theatre
II. That short piece proves “droll and illuminating”. Sadly, it can’t make up for the disappointing main event.
This Endgame is “studded with arresting moments”, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer, but what it lacks “is really powerful darkness”. The best performances are not those of the two leads, but of the two aged dustbin dwellers, Nagg and Nell; Karl Johnson is “simple and grave” and Jane Horrocks is simply “extraordinary”. That said, Cumming is still a commanding presence as Hamm – “posh and wittily malign”. Alas, Radcliffe is not in the same class. Scampering up and sliding down ladders, he shows himself to be impressively agile, but his acting is “almost entirely in gestures. He never suggests that his movements are generated from inside; when he hobbles you can almost see the stage directions.”
On the contrary, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out, in my view Radcliffe’s performance as the resentfully servile Clov is a “physical marvel”, vaguely recalling a “Monty Python
Gumby as he clumps and clonks about the stage”. Indeed, for an actor fated to be known as a wizard, Radcliffe is proving himself a “formidable clown”. His physical clowning skills plus Cumming’s “verbal showboating” – in a “flamboyantly scenery-chewing audience-pleaser of a performance” – make this Endgame much funnier than normal. This is Beckett presented almost as “surrealist sitcom”: it is “difficult” theatre made entertaining. And that’s a good thing.