When Samuel Beckett began work on Endgame in 1955, he had lost his entire immediate family — father, mother, and brother. Steeped in death, Beckett wrote what many consider to be his bleakest work. And yet, in his rare comments on the play, Beckett emphasized comedy over tragedy. Directing a German production of Endgame, he told the actors, “I would like as much laughter as possible in this play. It is a playful piece.” Endgame dramatizes the void that stretches before death; but from its depths comes the unmistakable sound of laughter.
Beckett’s father died of a heart attack in 1933, when Beckett was just 27 years old. It was a devastating loss for the young writer. Beckett had always been close with his father, often taking long walks with him through the forests surrounding their home outside Dublin. After losing him, Beckett said, “I can’t write about him. I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.”
Twelve years later, Beckett received news that his mother was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He visited her routinely over the following years, witnessing her slow deterioration. “I gaze into the eyes of my mother,” Beckett wrote, “never so blue, so stupefied, so heart-rending . . . these are the first eyes I think I truly see.” By 1950, his mother’s disease had reached its advanced stages. As dementia set in, he sat by her side, not knowing how long death was in coming. “My mother’s life continues its sad decline,” he wrote to a friend. “It is like the decrescendo of a train I used to listen to in the night… interminable, starting up again just when one thinks it is over and silence restored for ever.” Finally, after months of waiting and watching, his mother died in August of 1950.
Only four years after his mother’s death, Beckett’s brother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Just as he had done with his father and mother, Beckett returned to Dublin to keep vigil at his brother’s side. Over the proceeding weeks, Beckett waited once again. His letters from these months describe the slow crawl of time spent waiting for an end: “Things drag on, a little more awful every day, and with so many days yet probably to run what awfulness to look forward to. . . . Waiting is not so bad if you can fidget about. This is like waiting tied to a chair.” Four months later, Frank Beckett died.
In the wake of his brother’s death, Beckett sank into depression. “The notion of happiness has no meaning at all for me any more,” he admitted to a friend. “All I want is to be in the silence.” Out of this silence came a new play — a two-character piece featuring a servant and his wheelchair-bound master. Beckett’s yet-untitled play depicted a world devastated by disaster. This early draft of Endgame contained a number of allusions to the Great Flood, and although Beckett eliminated many of these references in later drafts, traces remain in Hamm’s name — Ham was a son of Noah — and in the descriptions of the rising water outside his dwelling.
But despite its origins in loss and devastation, elements of Endgame were inspired by instances of humor within suffering. In particular, Hamm, Clov’s crippled master, bears some resemblance to Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair. Her body rigid from severe rheumatoid arthritis, Cissie was confined to a wheelchair, stiff and immobile. Despite her suffering, she retained a sense of humor — once, after falling over in her wheelchair, she asked a friend to “straighten up the statue.” In this moment of laughter within pain, one can see the beginnings of Hamm, who exclaims from his wheelchair, “Don’t we laugh?”
In the tradition of Irish writers from Swift to Synge, Beckett weaves comedy with tragedy to create a parable of modern existence. “Let’s get as many laughs as we can out of this horrible mess,” he advised an actor in the 1964 London production of Endgame. Amid toy dogs, gaffs, and jokes about tailors and trousers, Beckett’s characters wait for the inexorable end. As scholar Katharine Worth notes, “The dread of life that broods over Endgame loses its solemnity when Clov squirts flea powder into his pants.” In Endgame, Beckett’s characters appear to be surrounded by nothingness — the earth is “corpsed,” the sea is lead, and death seems imminent. And yet, as Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell stare into the abyss, we still hear laughter. When confronted with the end, one move remains: “Me, to play.”
Whitney Eggers is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.
