Two months ago, Mark Rylance was playing a freewheeling social outcast in Jez Butterworth's hit play Jerusalem at the Royal Court, when he received an unexpected phone call. Simon McBurney, director of Complicite theatre company, was two weeks into rehearsals for his West End production of Beckett's Endgame, and both his lead actors – Richard Briers and Adrian Scarborough – had pulled out. Would Rylance step in and play opposite McBurney?
1. Endgame
2. Duchess theatre,
3. London
4. WC2B 5LA
1. Until 5 December
2. Box office:
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By rights, alarm bells should have rung. Rylance recalls that another actor once described the typical Complicite rehearsal process to him as follows: "It led to a day when, to a person, every actor was convinced that this was the first Complicite show that was going to be absolute shit. And it wasn't until Simon had fished out the last bit of hope that any of them might have had, and squashed it into a rich compost of all their ambitions, rotting there at the end of the garden, that something original could grow." Sitting beside him, McBurney laughs drily. Rylance continues: "Hearing this, I felt I had come to understand something about Simon. He has more capacity to deal with chaos, a wider love of randomness and impulse, than the rest of us."
Rylance wasn't put off, which is why the two men are now in a bar at the Duchess theatre in London, where they are preparing to play Beckett's tragicomic double act – Hamm and Clov, with Rylance as the imperious, despondent Hamm, and McBurney as his impatient servant. They make an intriguing double act themselves: McBurney, widely revered as a theatre visionary, fidgets with a piece of paper, while Rylance, a former director of the Globe theatre with a reputation for eccentricity, meticulously arranges his packed lunch of tinned salmon, lentils and mustard dressing on the table in front of him. Both speak softly – Rylance in sumptuous metaphors, McBurney with a probing intellect. There is a thrumming quality to McBurney, as though he were plugged into an electric current; his hair flies statically upwards from his head.
What outsiders don't appreciate about the theatre, McBurney says, is that it works in chaos. Even the greatest success can be a happy accident – like Boeing-Boeing, which won Rylance a Tony award for best actor when it transferred to Broadway last year. The production only came about because its director, Matthew Warchus, had a few weeks to spare and said to Rylance that he wanted to do "something silly". "Increasingly, I quite like things coming surprisingly," says Rylance. "Having spent 10 years at the Globe, being responsible for the fates of 100 or more people, it's very nice not to have to live a year in the future."
Admiration and envy
Rylance admits to being apprehensive about tackling Beckett for the first time. He emailed Beckett veteran Fiona Shaw for advice when he took the job (she said an actor needs to find a way of making the play as shocking as it first was), and is reading a biography for background. But the chief attraction of this production was the opportunity to work with McBurney. It's a first, but only by accident rather than design. The pair are close contemporaries – McBurney is 52, Rylance is 49 – and have followed each other's careers with interest.
McBurney says he first noticed Rylance when he was performing at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, in the early 1980s. "He was fascinating to me, because he seemed to be swimming somewhere in the mainstream of things. He was invited to work at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he played Hamlet – all the things that I never imagined would come my way." Rylance regarded McBurney with the same mixture of admiration and envy. The first time they were in a room together, he thinks, was in 1987. McBurney had come to see The Wandering Jew at the National, in which Rylance was performing, and "hadn't thought very much of it", Rylance recalls. "My impression was that Simon was very strident, quite frightening. I would go along to Complicite shows and think they were wonderful, and wanted to be part of that crowd, instead of being institutionalised."
He did try. In the early 1980s, Rylance and six friends set up their own experimental group, the London Theatre of Imagination. "We didn't have anywhere near the same success as Complicite," he says now. "I was very unhappy about that. I still hanker to make pieces – but I don't long any more to have a company. The Globe has kicked a lot of that out of my system."
Knowing McBurney now, Rylance wonders whether he has come to regard Complicite as a burden, in that he is always expected to do something groundbreaking. He sympathises with McBurney's desire not to have his theatre labelled. "I think it was one of the first things that got me into being an actor: I used to do many different, crazy things in my life to try and make people not sure what I was. That was particularly satisfied by acting different parts on stage."
McBurney doesn't contradict him, and adds: "As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am, except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that." (He has recently had roles in The Duchess and a forthcoming Harry Potter.) While he accepts that there are "consistencies and continuities" in his theatre work, he becomes twitchy at any suggestion that there is a Complicite style he might bring to Endgame.
This isn't such an outlandish proposal: Complicite productions are celebrated for their all-encompassing theatricality, and McBurney grows animated as he describes how Endgame is ripe for reinvention. "It's like an extraordinary installation of words – you could put it up in Tate Modern.I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with Endgame, where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth."
What infuriates him is the expectation that he will always take a radical approach. "In Germany, when you're asked to direct something, one of the first things they say is: 'What is your conzept?' To which I answer: 'I do not have a conzept.'" He emanates scorn. He says he is more interested in understanding Beckett's mindset. "He is extremely careful about his choice of words and actions," McBurney says – particularly when it comes to his precise but sometimes baffling stage directions. "Just as you speak a line of text and say, 'I don't know what that means', you do an action and say, 'I don't know what that's doing.'" The Beckett estate has a low tolerance for directorial interventions but Rylance predicts it will have no complaints: "I haven't been this faithful to a text, ever."
A compulsive curiosity
The struggle for understanding, says McBurney, has been at the root of every theatre piece he has ever worked on, whether it is understanding memory (1999's Mnemonic), mathematics (2007's A Disappearing Number), or the Japanese language (2008's Shun-kin). He puts this down to a compulsive curiosity: "I constantly want to know, what is a table, or what is a cat?"
This is a production he has been working towards ever since the earliest Complicite shows, mime pieces which he describes as "very Beckettian in spirit". His chief worry now is that: "People will see it and think that it's the finished thing. I know Mark and I will go on finding and finding, because we can. I can't think of any two rehearsals in which our interpretation has remained the same. Everything is a search."
Evening Standard
Mark Rylance is a masterclass in Hamm acting in Endgame
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”, says the legless old woman Nell in Samuel Beckett’s apocalyptic play. It’s a perverse claim, typical of Beckett, yet in Complicite’s claustrophobic production unhappiness does provide comedy. A blind man, Hamm, squirms in a wheelchair. His servant, Clov, cannot sit down and staggers around the stage; we sense he would like to go elsewhere but is inextricably bound to his master. In two bins lurk Hamm’s parents, Nell and her similarly disabled husband Nagg. They and Clov are conventionally thought of as the three nails on which Hamm (a truncated hammer) crashes down. Yet the interdependence of Hamm and Clov is clear: they share their suffering, and so do we. In chess, the endgame begins when there are just a few pieces left on the board. Crucially, it does not have to result in a decisive conclusion, since stalemate is always a possibility. Beckett’s characters seem trapped in that condition. They inhabit a depleted world, tormented by memories of a better past where there were sugar plums and flourishes of greenery.
They return repeatedly to images of this past — Nell lapses into a reverie at the mere mention of “yesterday” — and the future seems unimaginable. In 1957 the Lord Chamberlain’s office refused the play a licence because Beckett would not amend a line about God: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” He eventually relented and changed “bastard” to “swine”. Here the offending word is restored.
This is as it should be, for Beckett is the most linguistically sensitive of writers, and amid the play’s remorseless asperity there’s poetry — given brilliant expression by director Simon McBurney, who imbues every blighted element of the drama with a flicker of humour.
Mark Rylance brings mercurial fury and a haunted bittersweetness to the role of Hamm. Seated throughout, he nonetheless gives a performance of kinetic intensity. His modulations are adroit, though occasionally a bit immodestly telegraphed. One moment he resembles a dyspeptic club bore, the next a forsaken manchild; he is a king, a seer and a Christ figure, but also a hysteric and a stingy little bully. Simon McBurney’s stiff-legged Clov recalls a primitive wind-up toy, at once downtrodden and energetically resentful, while Miriam Margolyes is a touching Nell.
The design, by Tim Hatley, is a masterpiece of bleakness. Two high windows are eyes letting light into the set’s skull-like chamber; its mean mouth is a swing door brilliantly contrived to squeak in two different ways.
Yet even as Beckett reduces the world to a dungeon where mankind totters towards its end, he seems to intimate that art is the richest verification of our being imaginatively alive.
Beckett described Endgame as “rather difficult and elliptical”. He wasn’t joking. Some, inevitably, will complain that next to nothing happens, or that it’s
too desolate.
Nevertheless, it is not easy to imagine a much better production of the play than this one.
Henry Hitching - Evening Standard
A bleak world that ought to depress but is a pure delight Endgame is the masterpiece that sorts out the men from the boys when it comes to admirers of the bleak dramatic world of Samuel Beckett.
Waiting for Godot, as the recent West End revival starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart proved, may depict two men stranded in a hostile Godless universe, but at least they have the consolation of companionship and a determination to keep on keeping on. Krapp’s Last Tape may present us with a dying man whose hopes have turned to ashes but it is also illuminated by a beautiful memory of love. And in Happy Days, Winnie somehow keeps smiling even when buried up to her neck.
In Endgame (1957), however, Beckett mercilessly excludes every possibility of the positive. The world outside is described as a zero, and while Beckett was doubtless considering the possibility of nuclear annihilation, his evocation of an arid planet now also reminds us of the possibility of a world laid waste by global warming. Inside the grim penumbral room where the play takes place, cruelty prevails.
The monstrous Hamm, blind, unable to walk, and slumped in a wing chair on wheels, mercilessly bullies the slave, Clov, who may also be his son. Meanwhile, Hamm’s old mother and father are kept in dustbins and fed dog biscuits. Both die in the course of the play. When a flea is discovered in Clov’s crotch it’s a matter for grave concern for it might eventually mutate into a human and perpetuate the misery of life on earth.
The effect ought to be terminally depressing, but somehow one emerges from Simon McBurney’s superb production feeling strangely braced, even cleansed. This is partly because we know that except in our darkest moments, most of our lives aren’t quite as terrible as those Beckett depicts. But it is also because of the clarity, courage, spare beauty and pitch black comedy of the writing in Endgame. Even in this vision of hell, Beckett makes us laugh, and gasp at his sheer courage in making art out of terminal despair.
I haven’t seen a better production of the play than this. Fresh from his triumph in Jerusalem, Mark Rylance has mutated from a wild rural hero into a bitter, emaciated sadist, who loves the sound of his own cruel voice but who somehow also makes us laugh at his extravagant actor-laddy diction and feel sorry for his distress.
McBurney combines the cowed with the comically laconic as Clov, alternately raging at and cowering from his master, while scuttling up and down tepladders with legs that seem to have lost the ability to bend at the knee. And Miriam Margolyes and Tom Hickey, clinging to the rims of their dustbins like chimps clutching the bars of their cage at the zoo, bring warmth and memories of marital happiness to the stage, as well as a grim reminder of the senility that awaits us.
That such a dark, unsparing play can leave its audience feeling so richly rewarded is one of the mysteries of great art.
Charles Spencer - THe Daily Telegraph
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COMPLICITE - Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer Present
