{"id":327,"date":"2013-11-06T14:49:33","date_gmt":"2013-11-06T14:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reading.ac.uk\/staging-beckett\/?p=80"},"modified":"2013-11-06T14:49:33","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T14:49:33","slug":"review-endgame-the-blue-raincoat-theatre-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/staging-beckett\/review-endgame-the-blue-raincoat-theatre-company\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Endgame, The Blue Raincoat Theatre Company"},"content":{"rendered":"

6th<\/sup> to 16th<\/sup> March, 2013, The Factory Theatre, Sligo & 24th to 25th August, Happy Days Festival Enniskillen, 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Niall Henry<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With director Niall Henry and several company members trained in corporeal mine, the approach that the Blue Raincoat theatre company took to Waiting for Godot<\/i> responds to many of the demands that the play makes upon its actors\u2019 bodies. John Carty\u2019s Clov warps his spine into something resembling an S-shape: his head tilts forward, his back sags, pushing his abdomen out. His stylised limp reveals a deftness and control over gesture and body, which allows him to evoke the character\u2019s physical decay without diminishing the rhythm of the play. Peter Davey\u2019s Nagg and Sandra O\u2019Malley\u2019s Nell are, similarly, testaments to what can be done with the restricted body, with the former appearing in pale and craggy profile from his oil-drum.<\/p>\n

The realist box set, so often in Irish theatre an image of the cottage interior, however ironised, is rendered here in decay: there is no furniture bar the necessary chair for blind Hamm and a pair of oil-drums for Nagg and Nell; its walls are peeling, the inhabitants similarly dilapidated.\u00a0 The audience enters to this vision: rusting decay, with Hamm in its midst. The Blue Raincoat\u2019s home theatre in Sligo, The Factory, is a converted industrial space in which the company fits dressing rooms, foyer and black box space into what is quite a narrow, though high-roofed space. With seating raked against one wall, Endgame<\/i>\u2019s set fills the rest of black-box space entirely. When Clov examines the \u2018exterior landscape\u2019 through his telescope, there is very obviously no outside. The space meta-theatrically shuts down the possibility of an outside \u2013 beyond that \u2018window\u2019 is the solid brick wall of the theatre building, thus lending itself readily to the play\u2019s sense of claustrophobia.<\/p>\n

If the performance held a flaw, it lay perhaps in the most physically difficult role in the play, that of Hamm. While Ciaran McCauley\u2019s rendering of the part was deeply evocative of Hamm\u2019s decaying and restricted physicality, his vocal pitch modulated little throughout the performance. While this evoked Hamm\u2019s age and decrepitude, it did not communicate the pleasure he takes in narration, revealed in his self-congratulatory \u2018nicely put that\u2019. Like Winnie in Happy Days<\/i>, his words are the only pleasures left to him \u2013 there are no more painkillers after all, no more bicycles, nor bon bons. In this pared-away world at the end of worlds, words, and perhaps his torment of servant Clov, are his greatest pleasures. For this reason, the fact that McCauley did not modulate his voice to hint at this pleasure was somewhat problematic and meant that the true darkness of the play was not always registered: it does not rest in the cruelty of the relationships between Hamm and Clov, and Hamm and his parents, but in the abyss into which all of them, especially blind Hamm stares, and which he attempts to cover over with talk, stories, words. That said, this was a satisfying production from a company skilled in physical precision. The peeling walls and Clov\u2019s warped physicality give a sense of life encrusted and slowly dying, with Nagg and Nell a pair of statuesque icons of the apocalypse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6th to 16th March, 2013, The Factory Theatre, Sligo & 24th to 25th August, Happy Days Festival Enniskillen, 2013 Directed by Niall Henry   With director Niall Henry and several…Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReview: Endgame, The Blue Raincoat Theatre Company - Staging Beckett<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/staging-beckett\/review-endgame-the-blue-raincoat-theatre-company\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Review: Endgame, The Blue Raincoat Theatre Company - 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