This desolate masterpiece by Samuel Beckett has often been interpreted as post-apocalyptic. Outside is the end of the world with no more sun or nature. Inside the last humans are left standing. Instead of playing master-slave games, Lindsay Posner’s production turns them into desperate entertainers who wisecrack, amuse and perform even in these hopeless circumstances.
This theatre describes the play as a “macabre comedy” and that is what is rendered on stage. The blind, seated Hamm (Douglas Hodge, returning to the stage after more than a decade) is not so much a tyrant as an aged thespian, even if he whistles for his limping servant, Clov (Mathew Horne), and consigns his parents to dustbins. He bears elements of Winnie from Happy Days in his whimsy and escape into storytelling.
Like so many of Beckett’s characters, Hamm and Clov are engaged in an unspecified kind of waiting. Here, there is no prospect of a Godot figure saving them from the nothingness of the outside world. Yet still they carry on quibbling, joking and performing, with Hodge and Horne fizzing up plenty of energy between them.
Clov is dressed in the faded garb of the music hall, as are Nell (Selina Cadell) and Nagg (Clive Francis) in their dustbins – she wears a 1950s turban, once glamorous, while he is in a Chaplinesque bowler. Francis brings pathos while Cadell, as always, almost steals the show in her accompanying part.
The cast of four comprise a pair of double-acts here, all vaudevillian entertainers once, it seems, their outfits thick with dust, but you can still glimpse the faded red velvet grandeur in Jon Bausor’s costumes. Bausor’s set is positioned at a slant as if it is keeling over itself and is outlined by luminous light evoking a slightly tawdry late night floor show
Placing humour in the foreground means it is not half as savage as Michael Gambon and David Thewlis’s classic take, or the Old Vic’s spiky revival in 2020. But it does not undercut Beckett’s sadness either. Crucially, the cast finely balance comedy and desolation, bringing out the funny lines and physical humour of the play.
Clov is bent over, like a comic Igor, and speaks grumpy punchlines in broad cockney tones. Hamm is pompous and vulnerable by turns, putting on dramatic voices as if reliving his finest moments on stage. Nell and Nagg stretch their necks for their (nearly) kiss and it is tender, silly, desperate. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” says Nell. Quite.
• At Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, until 4 October
