Clov and Hamm, inseparable enemies at the Atelier theater in Paris

He is there, his feet anchored in the ground, his body swaying slightly, his arms dangling, his gaze distraught, his mouth sealed. In this room with two windows that are too high, with bare walls, cluttered with two metal drums and an armchair covered with white sheets, this man seems suspended. The words will come, without impatience, this silence is nurturing. Here they are. ” Finished. It’s finish. It will end. It might end. Then: “The grains are added to the grains, one by one and one day, suddenly, it’s a heap, a small heap, the impossible heap.” »

With this very particular modulation of the voice, this incredibly plastic body, Denis Lavant proves once again that he is an actor of rare intensity. Samuel Beckett has found his smuggler of words, those words that fall one by one like drops of heavy rain to express all the absurdity of an existence that does not want to end, that of Clov.

The last fireflies of a lifetime

Frédéric Leidgens emerges from under the sheets. He is Hamm. Dark glasses over blind eyes, a green cap, a blanket over his knees, a whistle around his neck, he will never move from his chair with big wheels. Only his long hands will fly all around him as if trying to catch the last fireflies of a life that, too, does not want to end.

His performance is of high quality, equal to his accomplice on stage. Both, directed with great sensitivity by Jacques Osinski, make the mysteriously beautiful text of Samuel Beckett, written in 1957, four years after Waiting for Godot, vibrate in unison. The director had already staged three plays by the Irish playwright, Nobel Prize winner for literature, with Denis Lavant – Cap au pire, La Dernier Bande and L’Image. Frédéric Leidgens joins them for this fourth crossing of a work as powerful as it is melancholic.

Condemned to live together in a space reduced to their two battered bodies, they come up against their terrible loneliness and a confiscated future. One paralyzed, the other limping. One talkative, the other silent. The days go by, the stories go by, always the same, the gestures too, immutable. Hamm whistles and Clov appears. Hamm orders and Clov executes. He unfolds the stepladder, climbs the few wooden steps to look only at the void stretching out behind the curtains, he comes down again, folds it up and redeploys it in front of the other window.

The “cursed progenitors”

Two other characters share this cramped and gray space (“light black” says Clov). Nagg and Nell embodied by the wonderful Peter Bonke and Claudine Delvaux. Like poor devils, they emerge from their trash can, the lid placed on their head. They are the “accursed progenitors”, the “fornicators”, as Hamm calls them. His parents who resist death. Them too. “Why did you make me? Hamm asks his father. “I didn’t know it would be you,” he replies. Between them, surely resentment, affection no doubt. “I hope I live to hear you call me like when you were little and scared in the night and I was your only hope,” Nagg said.

All of Beckett’s art lies in this balance on the thread of feelings between cruelty and tenderness. Likewise, his sharp dialogues continually oscillate between the tragic and the comic as if to defuse the surrounding darkness. But the smile that they sometimes wring from us makes our throats knotted. It is our poor human condition that Beckett gives us to see, reduced to exhausted bodies, cloistered minds.

rays of compassion

However, from this distress emerge through tiny interstices fragile rays of compassion. Beyond their hatred, Clov and Hamm love each other, in their wavering way, a love nourished by the habit they have of each other, by the even greater fear of ending up alone. If Clov is Hamm’s valet, he may also be the child he once took in. Beckett leaves room for doubt. As we will not really know if the departure as desired by Clov will succeed. “I leave you”, he repeats like a plea throughout this terrible camera.

——

“Endgame”, played all the time

Among the many adaptations:

Roger Blin premieres Fin de partie in French at the Royal Court Theater in London, April 1, 1957. He himself plays Hamm, Jean Martin, Clov, Georges Adet, Nagg and Christine Tsingos, Nell. The play will be revived shortly afterwards in Paris.

The Belgian Armand Delcampe directed, in 1995, two formidable actors: Michel Bouquet (Hamm) and Rufus (Clov). They are accompanied by Juliette Carré (Nell) and Marcel Cuvelier (Nagg).

The immense director Alain Françon will sign a memorable Endgame in 2011, entrusting the roles of Clov to Jean-Quentin Châtelain, Hamm to Serge Merlin, Nagg to Michel Robin and Nell to Isabelle Sadoyan.

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