Beckett, Brecht and Endgame Essay

While Beckett’s works are often defined by their existentialist themes, Endgame seems to offer no solution to the despair and melancholia of Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell. The work is replete with overdetermination that confounds the efforts of critics and philosophers to construct a single, unified theme for the play. Beckett resisted any effort to reconcile the problems of his world, offer solutions, or quench any fears overtly. However, this surface level of understanding that aligns Beckett with the pessimism of the Modernist movement is ironically different from the symbolic understanding that Beckett promotes through his characters and the scene. Beckett’s work does not suggest total hopelessness,

Beyond the vague, minimalist packages with which Beckett presented weighty questions to us as audiences of the ages, he is also the source of much debate of recent theatrical times. The line is both particularly fine and blurry between where a production has creative license to put on a show the way the director interprets it and where the playwright had specific intentions that are integral to the plot and themes of the play. As somewhat of a control freak when it came to how strictly a production had to follow his exact parameters within the stage directions, Beckett also provided the theatre world with opportunity for legal and philosophical debate on this matter specific to drama as an art form. He had much to offer to the literary world on a whole, evident in his peak achievement of the 1969 Nobel Prize for

The term metatheatre is used to refer to any instance in which a play draws attention to itself as a play, rather than pretending to be a representation of “reality.” Various uses of metatheatrical devices can be found in the works of William Shakespeare. One of Shakespeare’s favorite such devices is the “play-within-a-play.” With this device, the theatre audience finds itself watching an audience (on stage) watching a play. The play-within-a-play is thus a self-reflexive device that addresses the question of where audience reality ends and theatrical illusion begins. Shakespeare often incorporated the device as an integral part of his plots. A famous example can

In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the titular character struggles to engage in his desired plan of revenge. Hamlet shows throughout the play that he is inconsistent, indecisive, and unsure of himself, as well as his actions. The play focuses on Hamlet’s revenge; however, he continuously fails to happen at opportunistic moments. Throughout the play, Hamlet insists that he intends to avenge his father’s death through the murder of Claudius, but Hamlet fails to act on occasion because of his indecisive personality.

In this piece Berkoff decided to use frames as the sole piece of set; one for each member of the ensemble. We also used frames, again one for each member of the ensemble, alongside other pieces of set. These came into their own in the second half of the play. For example, in the final scene we created a courtroom using just frames, and built this on stage during Sierra’s speech. We felt that this was a compelling use of set, as Sierra’s moment of calm thoughtfulness is cut short by her rapist building a witness box around her. The crudeness of this image is an homage to the heightened politicised tableaux of Brecht; it is an example of gestus, and how the simple moving of a frame represents victims who are never able to escape the influence of their

“Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive”

Occurring frequently throughout the play, but particularly predominant at the end of Act I is the use of stage directions to

How Brecht achieves producing this state of consciousness is more subtle and elegant than the previous technique of having actors walk out with blatant placards to remind the audience that they are watching a play. One of the marks of Brecht’s epic theater is his alienation effect, or “a representation which allows [the audience] to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (Brecht 1948, 8).

Brechts work is based on the concept that theatre is a means of political persuasion for the masses. He sees the theatre as a tool to manipulate the audience, and to influence their day-to-day living once that have thought about issues raised during the performance.

As regards the delineation of the characters on stage and outside, the spectator is invited to pay attention to what is said and what is left unsaid, to what is revealed consciously or what is betrayed by the delivery of each of them, their gestures whether coordinately or impulsively performed.

Nearly every character in the play at some point has to make inferences from what he or she sees, has been told or overhears. Likewise, nearly every character in the play at some point plays a part of consciously pretending to be what they are not. The idea of acting and the illusion it creates is rarely far from the surface -

The ideas of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1965) changed the theatre in many ways. Brecht along with Erwin Piscator developed the style of Epic theatre style contrasting to previous accepted styles. Presentational in form, Epic theatre is a vehicle for social comment through techniques such as: alienation, historification, eclectic influences (highly Asian), constructivism in scenery, disjointed and illogical scene placement, ordinary clothing and lighting, the use of music to detach the audience from emotion, placards and signs and projected images. Didactic in nature Brecht’s works aim to challenge the

For example, he swayed his hand to and fro while one lantern was centered on him, creating a shadow on the wall. When the narrator was executing his “ingenious” plan for murder, he slowly entered the room, crouching down for what seemed like an eternity, and opened the lantern to shine light on his victim, showing his vulture-eye, therefore giving the narrator the motivation to kill him and giving the audience an uneasy feeling. The narrator's body language showed tension as he was anticipating the right moment to kill the old man and as he was lightly conversing with the police officer. During the majority of the play, the narrator would laggardly ascend and descend the stairs which captured his increasing uneasiness. The actor's true skill in portraying his character was most perceptible as he carried out the murder of the old man. He kills and dismembers him happily, clearly showing the audience that the character is in an unhealthy mental state. Additionally, the narrator continually explains to the audience that he is not insane and attempts to prove it by explaining his master plan of murdering and hiding the old man. However, the more the narrator explains to us how sane he believes himself to be, the more we believe he is not. To represent a change in setting, the narrator opens an imaginary door and paces up and down the stairs. To show time progressing, the narrator

"Clov asks, "What is there to keep us here?" Hamm answers, "The dialogue."" In the play Endgame, Samuel Beckett demonstrates dramatically the idea of codependency between the two focal characters who rely on each other to fulfill their own physical and psychological needs. Beckett accomplishes this through Hamm, who assumes the identity of a kingly figure, and his relationship with Clov, who acts as his subject. In Endgame, this idea is established by tone and humor in the dialogue amid Hamm and Clov.

I will look at Brecht’s theory of Epic theatre, tracing the beginnings