End Game, Tocilescu’s version – Humanity’s Full of Colour Relics

foto: MARIA  STEFANESCU

It has been told that Beckett’s work is the most complicated when it comes to interpretations. As little as its author wanted to talk about it, as many „profound readings” were given to it. Maybe that is why the best „interpretation” of a Beckett play is a new staging, the safest road to its meaning.

The thing is that the most evident property of Beckett’s writings for the theater is the admirable flexibility that allows the text to surrender to the director’s style, expressing it without losing anything from the content of ideas poured in it by the author. That is why one can see a very quiet, serene, vaguely cinical End Game taking place in a state of peace announcing the end of the world – a production signed by Tompa Gabor – or another one, with a modern sci-fi atmosphere and some humour, mixed with a paralysing resignation – offered by director Charles Müller for the co-production of the National theater in Sibiu and Luxembourg. As well as one can also see a very hot tempered staging, which exploits every signs of rebellion that characters give – because this is the director’s touch: Alexandru Tocilescu.

There is no doubt that this is the most consistent production in the repertory of Metropolis theater in Bucharest – a theater opened two years ago under a new name and with a new project and new ambitions. Famous director Alexandru Tocilescu has carefully picked up the music, as this is one of his usual methods of searching the way to build the universe of a new production. For Becket’s End Game he chose some songs played by Laurel&Hardy and gradualy, the main characters in the play, Hamm and Clov, became a similar comic couple. The hot temper of Hamm provokes the perplexity of Clov who steps back for a moment than attacks on his turn. Those two cannot live one without the other, but than again they cannot stand each other – isn’t it the way of living for so many couples and for so many close colaborators and friends? This type of love and hate relationship is a wide-spread pattern.

Tocilescu have gathered the perfect cast for this production: Răzvan Vasilescu (Hamm), Mihai Constantin (Clov), Irina Petrescu (Nell) and Ion Besoiu (Nagg) – the last two being golden relics of Romanian theatre. Răzvan Vasilescu is a true cameleon who doles his nervousness and transforms it into a weapon, succeeding in controlling Clov who –under the interpretation of Mihai Constantin - seems to carry on his shoulders the entire unfortune of the humankind.

The last pleasure for Hamm is to destroy Clov’s ultimate outbursts of humanity. They are together and in agreement only when they revolt against the kind of life that has turned them into what they are now. Here is where the couples - Laurel&Hardy and Hamm&Clov – grow apart. The first one are still the symbol of a warm humanity, and of an innocence neighbouring irresponsibility, and the others touch the layers of deshumanization and they even bath in this lack of feelings, even though they keep some fragile comic sources untill the very end.

Tocilescu creates an end of this game with a comic touch, like the last revolt against a life that makes fun of the people: he wants the people to be able to make fun of the life too, at least at the end of the world. Supporting this idea, the set-design and the costumes created by Vanda Maria Sturdza are coming from a wold in the last stage of degradation, where everything is broken and teared down and shabby, but painted in powerfull colours – red, electric blue – and textures that remind of the warmness of a real home (a used blanket for Hamm, a crocheted waistcoat for Clov) as if they refuse to admit the cold grey of the end. Clov, the only one who still moves through the claustrofobical space, the only one that can still catch a glimpse of light through the window is hunch-backed and has troubles moving his feet, as if he is growing prematurely old.

A dust is spread over everything, coming from the cluster where the dumping carts with the two old men inside are placed. Their nice chat, the typical, familiar chat of an old couple is gradualy vanishing, as the last sign of warm humanity in a post-apocaliptical universe that swallows everything.