“Endgame” is perhaps the most important text of the dramatic production and of all the works of Samuel Beckett (Dublin, 13 April 1906 – Paris, 22 December 1989), to the point that Theodor W. Adorno[1] started from the analysis of this play to articulate his interpretation of the writer he considered as the most representative of the complex events of art in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the famous German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist, this theatrical work fully reflected his conception of the work of art, fatally destined to declare the negativity of the present and to draw its positivity precisely from this declaration. For the scholar, “Endgame” was the emblem of one of the central postulates of his aesthetic theory [2], that is, the affinity of a language far from meaning with silence in not saying. According to this concept, the work, through the autonomy of its form from the empirical dimension, presents itself as its negation, giving expression, in terms of the possible, to what is not, but could be. In other words, the fact that the work exists and configures a different horizon with respect to the mere existing, represents the possibility of the possible. And in Beckett’s work this possibility of continuous longing, postponed and thwarted is the liberation of offended life, a sort of utopian compensation for the catastrophic history of the world, of which art in its yearning for beauty represents the hope.
Teatrino Giullare, “Finale di partita”, foto di Mauro Oggioni, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
“Endgame” was originally written in French and then, as was the custom of the Irish Nobel Prize winner for literature, translated into English; it was published in 1957 and debuted the same year at the Royal Court Theatre in London. As in other plays by the same author, first and foremost “Waiting for Godot” composed between 1948 and 1949 and published in 1952, the plot is absurdly claustrophobic and based on the almost actionless dialogue of a few characters trapped in the vicious circle of their aspiration to a new and different reality, always frustrated by mysterious paralyzing alibis. The two protagonists here are Hamm, an elderly blind man unable to stand, and his servant Clov, who complements him in his inability to sit down. Dependent on each other and alternately victim and executioner (like Pozzo and Lucky in “Waiting for Godot”), they live their existence arguing in a house outside of which there seems to be nothing, where they live together with Hamm’s very old parents, without legs and housed in two garbage cans. Clov would like to leave, but he doesn’t seem to be able to and remains to obey the angry and contradictory orders of his master, for whom he feels no pity or affection. The title of this enigmatic masterpiece refers to the third and final part of the game of chess, a phase characterized by the reduced number of survivors on the board and by the presence of the King who is no longer a piece to be defended, but a figure of attack. The affinity between the text and the game of chess, suggested by the playwright himself, is the cornerstone of the show currently on stage at the Teatro delle Moline in Bologna by the Bolognese company Teatrino Giullare (Giulia Dall’Ongaro and Enrico Deotti).
Teatrino Giullare, “Finale di partita”, foto di Mauro Oggioni, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The duo, known for their theatrical research based on the idea of an artificial actor, has in fact interpreted the piece as a set-up for stringless puppets as pawns on a chessboard-stage, and two masked player-puppeteers to animate them. The small Teatro delle Moline, located in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Bentivoglio, in addition to being a real gem in the heart of the university district, is the ideal habitat to bring to life this further translation between the character, the actor and his/her stage prostheses, amplifying with its miniaturized and minimal dimensions the game of Chinese boxes in which the comedy traps us from the very beginning. At the center of the scene, a table with a mighty and dusty chessboard, on which the mannequins move, making their steps (wood on wood) and their gestures reverberate, maneuvered by two actors wearing masks. The latter are in turn doubled by the large shadows that the light projects on the backdrop, which assimilates the theatre to a black cube, a magic box in which micro and macro merge and also include the few rows of seats in which the spectators sit, now part of that sarcastically anguished world. The interpretation of the actors (considered without distinction between puppets, puppeteers, shadows and even stage props) is very effective, in its punctuation of each line of the perennial altercation between the characters with the friction of their trajectories on the chessboard and the dull thud of their positioning on the square at the end of the move. There is no way out of that narrow perimeter where the two are condemned to hate each other and the schematic nature of the movements of the artificial actors amplifies the sense of coercion and madness that the dialogue is imbued with. A highly recommended show to see, in which the originality of the scenic device used proves particularly functional in enhancing the atmospheres and the dramatic specificities of Brechtian drama, without altering its essence.
[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Tentativo di capire il “Finale di partita”, in Noten zur Literatur (1974), trad it., Note per la Letteratura, Einaudi, Torino, 2012
[2] T. W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 1970 (ora in Gesammelte Schriften, VI, a cura di R. Tiedemann, Suhrkamp, 1973), trad. it. Teoria estetica, Einaudi, Torino 2009, p. 381
Info:
Teatrino Giullare. Finale di Partita
From 06/03/2025 to 08/03/2025 21:00
09/03/2025 18:30
Teatro delle Moline
Via delle Moline, 1/b – Bologna
www.bologna.emiliaromagnateatro.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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