Theatre review: The End by Samuel Beckett

Performed by Robert Menzies

Directed by Eamon Flack

Belvoir Street Downstairs Theatre

April 23, 2010

Robert Menzies begins his solo performance of the text of Samuel Beckett's novella by entering the cell-like Downstairs theatre space and standing bare footed astride a small, white cross on the concrete floor. He wears a crisp white shirt and tailored trousers and has about him the sense of disbelief of a condemned man dressed up for the undertaker. His eyes scan the audience, illuminated by the house lights and then, with tremendous psychic effort, he begins to speak the twenty two pages of prose set out in nineteen paragraphs by Beckett, unedited for this performance. 

The End was first published in French in Sartre's magazine Les Temps Modernes in 1946 and was subsequently released as a novel in English translation in 1955. The narrator is a man, a derelict, who relates a series of grimly humorous anecdotes drawn from the latter stages of his life on the street and on the run from various forms of authority and institution. Menzies delivers the monologue in a matter-of-fact style, adopting a broad working class Australian accent which, although pitched well to the tone of the text, occasionally results in lost words due to poor enunciation. But Menzies is a very fine, experienced actor whose intense concentration brings the audience in close proximity to the damaged heart of another of Beckett's lost souls. The author's literary obsession with terminal points found dramatic form in Krapp's Last Tape and End Game but in The End, there is a sense that the narrator could even be speaking to us from beyond the grave. Menzies infuses the telling with a wry bitterness well suited to a man disappointed with the abject mode of his demise.

Beckett spares no detail in his recounting of the physical and psychological horrors experienced by human beings made redundant by society. The plight of the forgotten, marginalised individual in this performance can be extrapolated to whole communities who have become dead weight to the relentless advance of progress, whether in late capitalist societies or any other ideological iteration. David Simon and Ed Burns provided a harrowing glimpse of just such people in their portrayal of the bleak Baltimore housing projects in the HBO television series The Wire. Like them, Beckett's narrator is extraneous to the use value of his milieu, no longer needed or wanted. Menzies made me wonder how many such people were in the nursing homes and shelters of Sydney that night.

Running at just over an hour this show is worth the time spent in the stark universe of Samuel Beckett, who remains as relevant as ever in his portrayal of human experience. Eamon Flack's direction is precise and measured; Teegan Lee's lighting design is subtle and slightly discomforting in the way that it exposes the audience to itself. Mercifully, there is no music or other superfluous sound for in Beckett silence is everything. Robert Menzies received a very warm response for a finely crafted performance dusted in pathos and gallows humour.