What Is Endgame Play

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Recommended: The theatre of absurd waiting for godot

After the morbid, post-war anxieties of the 1940s, Samuel Beckett sparked a new generation of expressionism in drama, known today as the Theatre of the Absurd. Distorting reality into a grotesque mixture of emotional grief and physical despair, this genre was accentuated by the way Beckett abused the concept of time. He conveyed characters lost in their melancholy, drawing them through the use of repetitive one-liners and slow neurotic musings. Perhaps the best example of Beckett bending time comes from his 1958 masterpiece Endgame.

Although the two main characters in the play, Hamm and Clov, banter with one another painstakingly in the present time, the slowness of the plot gives the characters a pressing need to reach a conclusion, and ultimately death. The play accentuates death and yet, it is not strictly a linear tragedy, where death is waiting in the wings because, ironically, death never comes.

Endgame is more of a tragicomedy. The audience must realize that the goal of the play is not to condemn or punish the character Hamm but to ridicule his lack of self-knowledge. His ...

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