The first sign that this revival of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece is not going to be the landmark production its director Richard Jones would want it to be is immediate.
From the moment Daniel Radcliffe’s Clov hobbles on to the stage, memories of Lee Evans’s superb performance in the role opposite Michael Gambon in 2004 gatecrash this show like an unwanted ghost. And it never really goes away.
Radcliffe has proved his acting mettle since his Harry Potter days with a series of well-received stage and screen performances. But as the near-crippled slave to Alan Cumming’s blind and chair-bound Hamm, Radcliffe is still too boyish to convey the required depth of suffering demanded. From his atrophied ankles to the tussled crop of boy band hair, Radcliffe is innately more of a hero than a victim. He can’t help it.
Cumming also cannot help but be himself. Sat on his chair with his skeletal legs exposed to the bare walls of his cell-like room, his Hamm’s view of life as irredeemably absurd is inflected with theatrical flourishes. They are always funny. But they lower the stakes. So when he and Radcliffe take their smiley curtain call, there is none of the relief that should be felt when we return to our comfortable world. Why? It can only be because Radcliffe and Cumming never make us leave it.
Where the production does convince is with Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell, consigned by their son to a living death in dustbins.
Played by Jane Horrocks and Karl Johnson, there is more chemistry and tragedy generated in just a few minutes than is managed by their co-stars in the remainder of this 90-minute play. Even so, Beckett survives all this. And although the author might balk at such literal connections, Hamm and Clov’s sterile existence — the identical days that mount like grains of millet into a meaningless life — chimes eerily with today’s planetary crisis. The evening’s only revelation is actually more of a confirmation. It comes with the playlet Rough for Theatre II in which Radcliffe and Cumming play officials tasked with weighing the life of a suicidal man.
As a companion piece to Endgame it contributes little. But as a way of confirming Beckett’s influence on Pinter it’s fascinating.
