Brittany Lunn

Critical Thinking & Writing

Cecilia Muhlstein

December 2008

Kicking Clichés and Taking Names

The meanings and metaphoric contents of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame have, since its first

production, been the object of rampant critical analysis. To the despair of directors, actors, and

critics, though, these analyses fall apart in the face of creating context for the play as a whole.

As actors and directors, Helene Keyssar and Richard Mennen approach this shortcoming of their

predecessors in analyzing Endgame as a text, seeking to find a way in which the play takes on
sensibility and meaning for performers, rather than treating it as another volume in the legacy of

Absurdist Theater.

Keyssar and Mennen are namely concerned with the play’s translation from text to stage.

They necessarily concern themselves with the interpretation of actions—their literality or the

latitude for embellishment inherent to convey the nuance of the text itself. Keyssar is thorough,

explaining the importance of emphasis on certain words, and how changing the word emphasized

in a given phrase moves it from inane and nonsensical to a moving interaction in which the

literal implication of the line and its accompanying stage directions drive the plot. Mennen, on

the other hand, addresses the simple playability of the text when it is clear to the players that

Beckett’s task in writing Endgame was not to create a symbol of the world after nuclear
holocaust. It is simply actors acting and people living, with no difference between the two.

“Truth and put-on become so entwined that it becomes pointless to try to separate them”

(Mennen 454). Literal interpretation, the exploration of the lines as words that have inherent

implications that must be detached from the meanings of the words, clears away any need to

muddle through inconsistencies that allegory creates. It leaves a performance that is unadorned

—naked, and profoundly touching.

Without Keyssar’s analysis of emphatic placement, the play as a performance is jumbled.

It appears to be a series of failures in communication. Yet, when Keyssar removes the

associations from the words, shifts the emphasis of the phrase, the characters connect on an

astonishing level. At this point, the lines begin not simply to make sense, but to be intuitive—to
be the only thing that person could say in that situation (Keyssar 225). The meanings of the lines

become clear; they are simple and comedic meanings. Says Keyssar, “While many subjects

mentioned in the text seduce themselves to metaphoric understandings, the play loses rather than

gains power if approached as a set of symbols” (232). Thus, in symbolic contexts, the words

lose both clarity and humor.

Richard Mennen’s commentary on the humor of literality depends on the literality

inherent to the words themselves, as Keyssar explains in detail. Of the two reviewers, Keyssar’s

analyses are more thorough and more important—especially to Mennen’s perspective as a

performer, though it is perhaps an explanation of a secret Mennen already knew. It is necessary

to derive meaning from Beckett’s words because “Actors cannot play symbols or abstractions”
(Keyssar 223). It is also for this reason metaphoric interpretations do not hold water—if the

entire play is symbolic, the characters must be symbols themselves, and the play could not be

performed. Thus it becomes vital to uncover the literal sense of the words.

Keyssar’s evidence is staggering—she not only presents a logical train of thought, she

demonstrates the effect of emphatic placement on textual interpretation. “By rights we should

have been drowned” (Beckett 21) can be read in two ways—the first uses “by rights”

idiomatically as an implication the Nagg and Nell were lucky to have escaped drowning, and the

second emphasizes that phrase beyond an offhanded expression to invoke ideas of justice

(Keyssar 225). Then, “You’re leaving me all the same” (Beckett 6) takes on the color not of

leaving Hamm in spite of there being nowhere else to go, but of leaving him unchanged while, in
the lines that follow, Clov himself has been transformed (Keyssar 225-6). In another exchange,

Hamm says, “Then there’s no reason for it to change,” and Clov responds, “It may end” (Beckett

5). A typical reading emphasizes “change,” indicating that nothing will ever be different because

it is simply illogical for anything to break a pattern. Clov’s answer, Keyssar suggests, implies a

different reading—one that places the greatest emphasis on “reason” and suggests that reason has

nothing to do with what happens (227). These literal readings strip clichés of their connotations

and force the audience to consider the actual meanings of the words they hear and how those

words interact with the words around them (230).

Keyssar reveals Endgame as an exercise in the life of language; the words themselves

become the performers. It is the interactions of words that color the text and shape the action,
which is otherwise quite ordinary. The actors’ performances must play on the living interactions

between the words so it is apparent to the audience that what they are hearing is a natural but

clever word game. Not only must the actors say the words in a literal way, they must act them in

a literal way (233). In so doing, the actors and characters are intertwined and the word game

becomes another acting game, “Seldom was there a moment that was not acknowledged as a

pose or a schtick…” (Mennen 454). The action and dialogue then take on an affect reminiscent

of actors warming-up on the stage (454). This intimacy gives the audience a full audio-visual

effect encompassing the banality and redundancy of the action, the cleverness of the word play,

and the profound tragedy of the characters.

 Helene Keyssar’s interpretations provide a cue to enjoying Endgame as a piece of writing

intended for the stage, but not to the nonsensical school of Absurdist Theater. She explains—

seven years after—what Mennen failed to illuminate. That is, why and how a group of actors are

able to be both character and actor on the stage simultaneously. Keyssar provides a code for

making sense of the words, and that code is the naked literality of Beckett’s every statement.

Through the action and dialogue, Endgame may take on symbolic shading, but the bare,

unadorned playfulness of language is the stage on which those metaphors stand.