Wizard of us

An evening with endless power to irritate
Dominic Cavendish reviews Endgame at Barbican
«An accusation often levelled at Samuel Beckett is that he was too controlling. His stage directions are profuse and precise - glaring deviations from them were frowned on in his lifetime and, since his death, have sometimes met with a punitive response from his estate. But you come away from Charles Sturridge's grimly underwhelming revival of Endgame wondering whether Beckett wasn't exacting enough. Perhaps he should also have stipulated the optimum height for his actors.

I say this because Sturridge has cast a very short American actor, Peter Dinklage - with whom he worked on his recent film remake of Lassie - as Clov, the servant and sidekick of the blind, sedentary Hamm. The politically incorrect term would be "midget" - but, given that Sturridge exploits Dinklage's diminutive stature in order to enhance the play's tragi-comic effect, there is no reason to refrain from using it here.

While it is nice that showbiz-orientated dwarfs have more to look forward to these days than being fired out of cannons, the sad truth is that Dinklage isn't cut out for such a big role.

The comic gains are slight. Now the reason why Clov must amble back and forth with a ladder to survey the apocalyptic landscape outside the pair's joyless cell is not because the windows are too high up, but because he's too low down. Tee-hee.

Whenever he is mute, the actor does carry added pathos about his person, but Dinklage's approach to Beckett's badinage is so stilted that not only does all sense of familiarity between him and his cantankerous master evaporate, but also the lyricism of the writing dwindles before our ears.

Marooned on the other side of the double act, Kenneth Cranham's chair-bound, tramp-like Hamm doesn't distinguish himself much either, stuck in the rut of a rasping monotone. Two unmoving supporting performances from Tom Hickey and Georgina Hale as the spectral, dustbin-bound Nagg and Nell - the original "white trash", if you will - add to the evening's power to irritate.

Eileen Diss's deliberately flimsy-looking set stresses the theatrical in-jokery of the script, but the usual laughs prompted by lines such as "Will this never finish?" die in the throat here. The pain and despair of the quartet's terminal situation never bites, only the interminable ennui. Coming so soon after Michael Gambon and Lee Evans's stupendous account in the West End, this is a life-sapping disappointment.»
Published in the Telegraph - 24 Apr 2006