Endgame (Beckett)

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Final (fr. Fin de partie , Eng. Endgame ) is a drama of Samuel Beckett in 1956. The French original was translated into English by the author. The first performance of the one-act play took place on April 3, 1957 at the Royal Court Theater in London, as initially no theater in Paris dared to tackle the play, although Beckett was already established as a playwright after the success of his first stage work Waiting for Godot .

The German premiere, directed by Hans Bauer on September 30, 1957 in the Schlossparktheater in Berlin, met with such a lack of understanding that the play was canceled after just eight performances. It was not until Beckett's own production, ten years later in the workshop of the Schiller Theater in Berlin, that it had 150 performances and was critically acclaimed.

action

After a great catastrophe, part of the world has turned to ashes, in others there is no population, in still others many things of everyday life no longer: porridge, chocolates, coffins, electricity, dogs, seagulls, forests, rain and nature - the Civilization fell apart. Meanwhile, a new danger looms from somewhere that will soon bring about the final end of humanity.

Four people live in a claustrophobic "shelter", only two small windows high above provide a view of the outside, where nothing can be seen. The survivors are dominated by the blind and paralyzed Hamm, who sits on a wheelchair because he cannot stand. Next to him, on stiff legs, is waiting for Clov, whom Hamm welcomed “like a son” a long time ago and who also struggles to walk, but under no circumstances can sit. Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell, who lost their legs in an accident, live in two garbage cans.

Conscious of the inevitable end, Hamm continues to tyrannize the cramped rest of the area with his “games”: He insists that Clov put his wheelchair “roughly” and “roughly” and, logically excluded, at the same time “precisely” in the center of the Zimmer pushes; he forces Clov to use binoculars to look out the windows; he has Clov make a plush dog for him; he demands an "invention" from Clov, who then decides to wind an alarm clock; he compels all survivors to pray silently to God; he forces Clov to ask questions about a story: "Go ahead and drill, child!"; he asks Clov to open the window, although he would not hear the sea even with the window open.

This focus on domination and control of his environment in an “endgame that has always been lost” contrasts with his ignorance about the cause of the global catastrophe: “Everything happened without me. I don't know what happened. ”With his cynical fatalism, he declares intervening action impossible:“ But think about it, think about it, you are on earth, there is no remedy for it! ”After all, Hamm also has all of his“ tranquilizers "And he realizes:" It's over. It's over with us. "

The relationship between servant and master, between Clov and Hamm, is marked by mutual aversion. Clov hates Hamm and wants to leave him, yet he obeys his instructions: “Do this, do that, and I'll do it. I never refuse. Why? ” Clov doesn't have the strength to leave his tyrant or to refuse his absurd games. The bias in the perspective of submission, his functioning in the usual system is more important for Clov than his survival. He therefore only accepts the signs of the apocalypse stoically or even with a laugh. Clov torments himself with this dilemma, because if he leaves Hamm, Hamm will die because Clov is the only one of the survivors who can look after him. But then Clov would also die, since only Hamm knows “how the pantry opens”.

Hamm despises his "cursed producers" just as they despise him. Nell, his mother, encourages Clov to go secretly, knowing full well that this would mean her death as well. The words of Nagg, the father, reveal his relationship to Hamm: “Who did you call when you were little and were afraid, at night? Your mother? No. Me! We made you scream. Then we put you far away to be able to sleep ... I hope to live long enough that I can hear you calling me, like once when you were little and were scared, at night, and when I was your only hope . ” In fact, towards the end of the piece, Hamm calls out“ Father ”several times, while at the beginning he wanted to“ dispose of ”the“ cursed producer ”and his mother like garbage.

Finally Hamm surrenders to his fate and accepts the inevitable: “It's over, Clov, we are over. I don't need you anymore. ”In a final monologue he gives in to his memories and his self-pity. Clov is waiting, ready to go, but won't go.

interpretation

Structure of the piece

The contrast between the complete external loss of control and Hamm's internal demonstrations of power in the hideout is the primary and in many facets dominating structure of the piece. The survival of mankind, the categorical imperative of action in general, becomes on the stage a sequence of out of time and therefore insane plays of the survivors before the end of all civilization.

Erwin Piscator writes in his introduction to Rolf Hochhuth's documentary theater Der Stellvertreter , the theater generation that followed the theater of the absurd , that previously, “in the absurd construction of human existence”, a “theory of the erasure of historical action” had been represented to meet all those "who today want to avoid the truth of history, the truth of their own historical actions." This expressionism has heightened the " allegorical as it were " imprecisely and lyrically, "which gradually assumed fantastic, unreal traits."

The drama was created after the Korean War, after the defeat of France and during the growing engagement of the USA in Indochina, during a hot phase of the Cold War. In parallel with the first drafts, the US and the USSR experimented with their atomic bombs. Beckett reduces this context of the piece's genesis to an enigmatic poetic image of society dying in fatalism. Does Hamm personify the ignorance of the powerful about the impending annihilation? And maybe Clov the fear of saving change? Hamm is dependent on his wheelchair, Clov only moves on shaky legs and Hamm's parents are even stuck in their garbage cans - does the restricted movement of the dramatis personae have an allegorical function? There is no direct reference to this in the piece, but an answer may be found in the fundamental contradiction between external chaos and internal control.

Christian Linder characterizes the piece as radically chaotic : If one defines disorder as a state in which it is equally likely that the comb is in the brush and in the butter, then that is an exact description of the connections between the images and words and things in this play. Therefore everything can merge into everything. There are permanent metamorphoses of seriousness and not seriousness, of kitsch and poetry, of parody and terrible truth and everything in the form of rubble. You can hardly take it much further than Beckett did, because then nothing else would arise than the former flickering on the television screen after the program ended.

Wolf Banitzki contradicts this: To put it again emphatically, “ Endgame ” has an internal structure that you cannot intervene in without destroying. Therefore it is necessary to fathom the structure in order to be able to interpret it. Beckett saw nothing complicated in this: “Hamm is a king of this game of chess that was lost from the start. He knows from the start that he is making transparent, nonsensical features. That he makes no progress with such mistakes. Now at the end he makes some nonsensical moves that only a bad player would make. A good one would have given up long ago. He's just trying to put off the inevitable end. Each of his gestures is one of the last useless moves that postpone the end. He's a bad player. "

genus

Often final as an example of absurd theater led. Thomas Anz even describes the piece as the “most radical form” of the absurd theater. With regard to the label “absurd theater”, Aleksandra Kwasnik and Florian Dreyssig state: Absurd, worth correcting, was never his [= Beckett's] theater. [...] Absurdity, that was Beckett's theme, the human being as a joke in the cosmos, which he let play conventionally with the means of the theater. Even Wolfgang Hildesheimer warns that one should not be confused with an absurd representation, the representation of the absurd. Werner Düggelin gives Beckett's justification for the use of garbage cans on stage as an example of the fact that the way of playing itself is not nonsensical : It is an elegant method of making figures appear and disappear without them appearing and leaving would have to.

According to Konrad Schoell, Samuel Beckett's dramas are examples of “ abstract theater”. Schoell defends himself against Aristotle 's theorem, according to which a drama cannot be imagined without mimesis . At least for the text of the drama (even if not for the performance) it applies that the dramatic “personae” are not necessarily “acting” characters, that the “plot” can also step on the spot without reaching a goal. The story in a drama can be "reduced to zero". Such a drama is an "abstract drama". From “En attendant Godot” to “Krapp's Last Tape”, from “Fin de partie” to “Happy Days” and “Play”, from “Come and Go” to “Not I” we can achieve a progressive reduction of the characters and theirs Determine the scope for action. This reduction is clearly used for concentration. Even if all the texts mentioned still have a “story” to show or report, the concentration of space, the number of people and, above all, their ability to act leads to a kind of abstraction.

And Kindler's New Literature Lexicon judges: Human existence as a borderline situation between life and death, characters who insist on the eternally disappointed illusion of waiting or in tragicomic helplessness cover up the certainty of their decline - that is what Beckett's plays are all about. In the context of apocalyptic scenarios, the endgame shows human life as a futile search for a way out.

Meaning of the names

Performers have pointed out that the name "Hamm" is the abbreviated form of the word "hammer" and the three other names stand for the word "Nagel": "Nagg" for the German, "Nell" ("nail") for the English and “Clov” (“clou”) for the French version. The endgame is "a game for a hammer and three nails". In 1967 Ernst Schröder , who played Hamm, asked Samuel Beckett during the dress rehearsal for the final whether this interpretation was correct. The author is said to have answered: "If you will."

According to Konrad Schoell, the name Hamm refers to the English term "ham actor" (German: "Schmierenkomödiant").

Productions

Endspiel was commissioned by the actors Jean Martin and Roger Blin and premiered by them on April 3, 1957 at the Royal Court Theater in London in the first French version. The German premiere was on September 30, 1957 in the Schlosspark Theater in Berlin (Director: Hans Bauer. Actors: Bernhard Minetti , Rudi Schmitt, Werner Stock and Else Ehser ). Werner Stock also took part in Beckett's own production, which premiered on September 25, 1967 in the workshop of the Schiller Theater , alongside Ernst Schröder , Horst Bollmann and Gudrun Genest . The production, which Joel Jouanneau brought out in 1995 at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne with Heinz Bennent , David Bennent , Mireille Mosse and Jean-Claude Grenier, was shown at the Avignon Festival and as part of a tour with over 100 performances in Germany (in German) shown. In 2011, Endspiel was staged at the Schauspielhaus Zürich under the direction of Stefan Pucher . In September 2016, a production by Dieter Dorn with Nicholas Ofczarek and Michael Maertens premiered at the Vienna Akademietheater , which had previously been shown at the Salzburg Festival. Robert Wilson staged the piece with its premiere on December 3, 2016 at the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin. Since November 16, 2018 the play has been directed by Anne Lenk at the Munich Residenztheater .

music

To final wrote Philip Glass 1984 Overture for double bass and drums.

György Kurtág set the piece to music with his own libretto in French under the title Fin de partie . The world premiere took place on November 15, 2018 at the Teatro alla Scala .

output

  • Samuel Beckett: Endgame / Fin de partie / Endgame . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-36671-8 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Samuel Beckett: Endgame. Piece in one act . Transferred by Elmar Tophoven, Erika Tophoven and Erich Franzen. In: Elmar Tophoven and Klaus Birkenhauer (Eds.): Theater plays. Dramatic works 1. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1995.
  2. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 104 f., 107 ff., 113, 120, 125 f., 134, 147 .
  3. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 110, 121 .
  4. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 104, 142 .
  5. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 119 f .
  6. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 118 .
  7. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 118 f .
  8. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 125 .
  9. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 129 .
  10. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 134 .
  11. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 136 f .
  12. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 140 .
  13. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 150 .
  14. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 145; 142 .
  15. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 133, 142; 145 .
  16. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 131 .
  17. ↑ Beckett himself referred to the constant guerrilla warfare between the two as the "core of the piece".
  18. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 110, 146 .
  19. ^ Samuel Beckett: Endgame . S. 103, 121, 145, 149 .
  20. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 107, 124 .
  21. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 108; 131 .
  22. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 135 .
  23. ↑ Beckett: Endgame . S. 148 .
  24. ^ Rolf Hochhuth: The deputy. A Christian tragedy . With a foreword by Erwin Piscator and essays by Karl Jaspers, Walter Muschg and Golo Mann. 40th edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-10997-3 , pp. 9 ff .
  25. ↑ Christian Linder: Samuel Beckett's ideas of the apocalypse . Deutschlandfunk . May 1, 2012.
  26. ↑ Wolf Banitzki: The daring pranks of Sarah Schley . Theater reviews Munich . June 6, 2009.
  27. ↑ Thomas Anz: Modernist literature after the end of the war. Memories of the existentialism of the 1950s in France and Germany - on the occasion of Sartre's 100th birthday at: literaturkritik.de , May 31, 2005.
  28. ↑ Aleksandra Kwasnik, Florian Dreyßig: The wait goes on. Just keep going . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . May 11, 2010.
  29. ↑ Wolfgang Hildesheimer: About the absurd theater. A speech. In: ders .: plays. About the absurd theater . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 169-183. The speech was given in Erlangen in August 1960.
  30. ↑ Werner Düggelin, Stefan Pucher: The perfect piece ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Schauspielhaus Zürich Zeitung # 3. January 17, 2012, pp. 13/15. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schauspielhaus.ch
  31. ^ Konrad Schoell: About Samuel Beckett's work. Essays and studies . kassel university press. 2008. Section Beckett and the Abstract Theater. Pp. 86-101.
  32. ^ Kindler's New Literature Lexicon . Volume: Ba-Boc. 2nd Edition. 1989, p. 380.
  33. ↑ Volker Canaris : Samuel Beckett as a director of his own plays. In: Peter Seibert (Ed.): Samuel Beckett and the media. New perspectives on a media artist of the 20th century . transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2008, p. 33.
  34. ^ Konrad Schoell: About Samuel Beckett's work. Essays and studies . kassel university press, 2008, p. 26.
  35. ↑ http://www.schauspielhaus.ch/de/play/211-Endspiel
  36. ↑ Schedule ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Burgtheater / Akademietheater @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.burgtheater.at
  37. ↑ Echoes of a world in turmoil. Der Tagesspiegel from December 4, 2016.
  38. ↑ Endgame . Retrieved April 15, 2019 .
  39. ↑ https://www.zeit.de/2018/48/fin-de-partie-endspiel-gyoergy-kurtags-oper-drama-mailand-inszenierung