About the work
Samuel Beckett's one-act play („Fin de partie", „Endgame") was premiered in London in 1957 — in French, since Beckett wrote it first in that language. The English version followed later. „Endgame" is, after „Waiting for Godot", Beckett's most important work and is considered the high point of absurdist theatre — an end-time play around four figures in a hermetically sealed room.
Plot
In a bare room with two small high windows and a door, Hamm sits, blind and paralysed, in a wheelchair at the centre of the space. His servant Clov, who can no longer sit, hobbles back and forth between the two windows reporting what is outside (nothing). Hamm's ancient parents Nagg and Nell live in two dustbins at the edge of the stage, occasionally sticking their heads out. The world outside appears to have been destroyed — perhaps by atomic war, perhaps by some other end. In ritualised repetitions the figures complain, quarrel, tell stories — Hamm his endless, never-finished „story", Nagg his jokes, Nell dies. Clov threatens to leave but cannot get away. In the closing image Clov stands at the door, ready to travel in coat and hat, while Hamm loses his final game: he covers his face with a handkerchief and freezes. Clov does not move.
Cultural significance
Endgame is Beckett's most concentrated work and is considered by many — Beckett himself included — to be his best play. The radical reduction (four figures, one room, no plot) and the chess metaphor (Hamm = king, Clov = knight) make the work a model of modern end-time theatre. Productions by Walter Asmus (Beckett's pupil), George Tabori, Michael Haneke (1989) and Jürgen Gosch in Düsseldorf are reference performances. Theodor W. Adorno's essay „Trying to Understand Endgame" (1961) is standard reading.