Endgame
★★★★☆ Beautifully judged
Bedlam Theatre: Wed 1 – Fri 3 Oct 2025
Review by Hugh Simpson
The EUTC’s production of Endgame, at the Bedlam for three nights, is an exemplary production on almost every level. The direction and all of the performances are very fine indeed.
Samuel Beckett’s 1957 drama is probably his second most celebrated after Waiting For Godot (although Beckett himself considered Endgame the superior drama). This play also features characters who do a great deal of waiting about – the chair-bound Hamm, his put-upon servant Clov, who is unable to sit down, and Hamm’s aged parents Nagg and Nell, who are confined to dustbins.
Robbie Morris, Noah Sarvesvaran, Jude Rogers and Abi Price in Endgame. Pic Emily Sharp.
There isn’t even the illusory hope of a Godot for these characters; they appear to be confined to a room with everyone outside already having died in some unspecified catastrophe.
The combination of absurdist tragedy and bleak comedy makes this a popular play to stage (those many new plays billed as ‘darkly humorous’ should always take another look at Endgame before plumping for that label). Yet it is very difficult to get right.
The dialogue, the seemingly inconsequential movements around the stage, Hamm’s ‘raconteurial style’, the repetitions that almost take on the quality of music – all of these must be done with an exact attention to detail.
clear vision
Which is what this version undoubtedly has. Director Bella Burgess has a clear vision and considerable theatrical nous, and has fashioned a production of great impact. The seemingly humdrum exchanges, the grotesqueries, those moments when the characters seem to be aware they are participants in a drama, they are all done beautifully and without fuss.
There is also a considered nature to every one of the characters’ gestures and vocal inflections that is extremely pleasing, with the split-second timing greatly enhancing the comedy. Robbie Morris’s excellent Hamm is wonderfully volatile and tyrannical, if unavoidably a little youthful, and invests the characters’ outbursts with such meaning that he begins to appear unusually sympathetic.
Robbie Morris in Endgame. Pic Emily Sharp.
Noah Sarvesvaran’s limping Clov is more energetic than usual, becoming breathless with effort as he fulfils the unreasonable demands placed on him. Once again, this is an exemplary performance, his hangdog loyalty and eagerness to please making his co-dependent relationship with Hamm almost explicable.
Clov’s desire to leave, and inability to do so, has sometimes been suggested as the genesis of Steptoe and Son, echoed here by Jude Rogers as Hamm’s aged father Nagg. There is definitely something of Old Man Harold Steptoe in a leering, gurning performance that is very funny and also has considerable pathos. Abi Price’s Nell, meanwhile, is considerably prissier, and has a command of timing that gives the smallest expression extraordinary weight.
There is a pace and rhythm to the production that is admirable, but there is the odd glitch that stops it reaching five-star territory. It does start to lose that rhythm a little towards the end, while there are a couple of odd staging choices.
minor quibbles
Hamm in particular looks far too clean and dapper to be a post-apocalyptic survivor, with his tartan trews and bunnet, allied to his cut-glass accent, making him look uncomfortably like a Tory MP at play in the countryside. The decision to have the two all-important windows suspended from above (and swinging freely as a result) also does not quite work.
These are merely minor quibbles, but the representation of Nagg and Nell’s iconic dustbins is more serious. They are too clearly only half-bins, and far too shoogly, and it is all too apparent that the characters are crouching near them rather than in them.
None of this detracts too greatly from the overall effect, however. This is very good indeed, and really has to be counted as one of the best productions of Beckett seen in Edinburgh in years.
Running time: One hour 35 minutes (no interval)
Bedlam Theatre, 11B Bristo Place, EH1 1EZ
Wednesday 1 – Friday 3 October 2025
Daily at 7.30 pm
Tickets and details: Book here.
Production Instagram: @endgame.eutc
Robbie Morris, Noah Sarvesvaran, Jude Rogers and Abi Price in Endgame. Pic Emily Sharp.
ENDS
