Theatre in Review: Endgame (Druid/Irish Arts Center) Garry Hynes' production of Samuel Beckett's classic study of stasis, oppression, and (quite possibly) the end of the world derives much of its effect from the yawning gap between the characters' grandiloquent delivery and their appallingly tawdry circumstances. The latter is fully put on display, beginning with the ominous rumblings of Gregory Clarke's sound design. Francis O'Connor's set is a curved concrete bunker with a circular deck and two curtained windows placed out of human reach. The drain, located at stage center, hints at all sorts of sinister uses. James F. Ingalls' lighting cuts through a doorway, the windows, and an oculus overhead, creating geometric compositions. The garbage cans, which famously contain the decrepit Nagg and Nell, come with creepy uplighting effects. It is, in sum, a place of utter desolation. And, as it happens, of dark comedy. Inhabiting a ruined world -- "Nature has forgotten us," we are assured -- everyone onstage is given to such grand gestures and oracular pronouncements that they might be members of Henry Irving's stock company. As Clov, the in-house slave, Aaron Monaghan scurries about like a cockroach with sciatica -- but consider the flourish with which he pulls dustcloths off the trashcans and the chair occupied by Hamm, his imperious, blind master/tormentor. Or the roar, from the bottom of his soul, with which Rory Nolan's Hamm denounces his father Nagg: "Cursed progenitor!" Or the veiled menace with which Bosco Hogan, as Nagg, tells Hamm, "I hope the day will come when you'll really need to have me listen to you, and need to hear my voice, any voice." The great Marie Mullen has the least amount of stage time as Nell, but when she cuts off a question from Nagg ("Do you remember-"), her "No" is the brusque cancellation of anything that might resemble hope. Even better is her remark, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," to which she adds, "Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh anymore." This little speech is delivered with an autumnal resignation that is the closest thing to tenderness in the Beckett universe. "What is there to keep me here?" wonders Clov. "The dialogue," replies Hamm; he's got that right. A recent, very fine Irish Repertory Theatre production, featuring John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin as Hamm and Clov, took a similar approach, but the Druid company ups the ante, each using his or her superb vocal instrument to transform Beckett's verbal music into a four-part harmony marked by notes of dispossession, fury, and bitter humor. Hynes provides many indelible bits of staging: Monaghan, performing a series of utterly useless tasks, often involving a ladder, is the busiest of the four, forever in motion, frequently announcing his imminent departure yet never managing to leave. (Hang on for the bit when, discovering a flea -- or is it a crab? -- on his person, he douses himself with powder, assuaging Hamm's fear that from one of these pesky insects "humanity might start all over." Nolan, his forehead ridged with lines like the face of a mountain, his skull covered with lesions, is imperious and demanding yet utterly helpless, depending on Clov to correctly place his chair and provide him with updates, usually misleading, about the quality of sunlight or the color of his stuffed dog. (Check out Hamm's quilted dressing gown, also designed by O'Connor, a once-magnificent garment grown fetid and torn, its bottom half so tattered, it looks like a tutu.) There's agony in his voice when calling out for his painkiller, and real apprehension when he asks Clov, "We're not beginning to...to... mean something?" Rest assured, the answer is no. I'm not saying only the Irish bring out the best in Beckett, but it surely helps. That and classical training: Monaghan, a first-rate Estragon several seasons ago in Druid's Waiting for Godot, and Nolan both understand that the coal-black hardness of the playwright's words harbors considerable glitter. Even with much less to do, Hogan and Mullen are scarcely less accomplished; ever since I saw this production several days ago, I've been haunted by the memory of Nell's query, "What is it, my pet? Time for love?" In this place? What a question. We're having a mini Beckett festival in New York this fall, with the Broadway revival of Godot and Stephen Rea's recent appearance in Krapp's Last Tape at the Skirball Center. Yes, Godot is the play that rewrote the rules of modern drama, ushering in the era of absurdism, but, to my mind, the tense and compact Endgame is more successful. Its concentrated situation, featuring four characters trapped in an existential holding pen, hiding out from a world reduced to a blasted heath -- Beckett would probably hate it, but you can read the play, at least in part, as an ecological parable -- is inherently more dramatic than Godot's portrait of tramps lost in an endlessly receding landscape. As always, the playwright isn't for everyone -- at the performance I attended, there were a few walkouts -- but the playwright's ability to capture the unsettled mood of the postwar West, a time and place where ideals were incinerated in the flames of genocide and mass murder, remains impossible to dismiss. And this production is a pristine piece of work, unmissable for anyone who cares about this monumental playwright. --David Barbour 
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