End Game at Advent

It’s early November now and the Christian year is coming to a close with Advent just a few weeks away. The mist this morning shrouded all but the essential details of my route as I ferried my wife and kids to their respective schools. It’s strange how such a grey haze devoid of colour and the intricate forms of the landscape focuses the mind on what really matters. The cherry trees outside my window are stripped to just a few tattered leaves hanging limply from their spindly branches. The trees’ dark structure is etched against the pale sky now the fog has cleared and I think back to springtime when they were so fleetingly in bloom. On Friday we took the students at my school to see “End Game” in the West End. The play starring Mark Rylance and Simon Mc Burney was written by arguably the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett. Some people find Beckett’s plays either incomprehensible or so utterly bleak that they have little stomach or patience for them. I suspect many Christians would bridle at their apparent nihilism. In his most famous play, “Waiting for Godot” one of the characters makes the following observation about humanity: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ However, as this magnificent production of one of his other great works demonstrated, Beckett’s perception of the human condition is so brilliantly illuminated because it is invariably pared to the bare bones by this master craftsman of dramatic technique.

In End Game a tyrannical old rogue Hamm sits in a bare room, shrouded by grey light. He is unable to stand and his useless legs dangle impotently just above the floor. There are two high windows in this cell which, so we are informed, look out on one side to the earth and on the other to the ocean. His aged parents live in two metal ashbins placed side by side at the front of the stage. We only ever see their drawn faces peeping out and spindly fingers feebly gripping the rim of the bins like animals in a cage. Hamm lords it over them and his sad clown of a servant Clov. This pathetic figure is apparently unable to sit down thus heightening the anguish of the daily trial of serving his master. Hamm summons his servant from an off-stage kitchen by blasting his shrill whistle and he perceives their life together as a game which must be played to its bitter end; hence the title. On one level Beckett exploits these surreal elements to create some familiar comic routines based around clowning and vaudeville acts involving age-old conflicts between masters and servants; but he also uses them as a metaphor for how life can so often feel for many people today. The old may identify with, and even laugh at, the image of life reduced to living in a dustbin, waiting to be fed and hoping to die; old peoples homes can sometimes seem little more than this. Those of us who seem to have spent our lives going through the same predictable routines at work and at home simply to keep a roof over our heads will surely understand Clov’s maddening frustration as he endlessly carries out his master’s bidding. How many of us sit in dreary meetings wondering what on earth we’re doing as we work through apparently unchanging agendas that never seem to change anything. Hamm’s furious, impotent ranting and absurd posturing are hysterically funny in Mark Rylance’s virtuoso performance but they are also perhaps a fair, if somewhat heightened, reflection of our own vainglorious existence emphasizing our futile quest to assert control over our fellow man and the world around us. The writer of Ecclesiastes in the Bible would have recognized Beckett’s world all too clearly. Indeed the first lines of this treatise on the human condition could have been written by Beckett himself: ‘“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”’ The book continues in words akin to those quoted from “Waiting for Godot” earlier: ‘Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes so he departs. He takes nothing from his labour that he can carry in his hand.”
Both Beckett and the Biblical scribe seem to take a perverse pleasure in using their poetic vision to shatter our fanciful illusions of the neat and ordered ‘picket-fence’ existence we are inclined to take refuge behind. However, we can choose to respond to Beckett’s bleak comedy either positively or negatively. We may, rather like the characters in his plays, remain stubbornly entrenched in our false existence, 'waiting for Godot' or playing the same old games over and over again. More positively we may allow his shocking, brutal humour to wake us up from our torpor and begin in us the work of redemption. Advent is also a wake up call. It reminds us what is essential; the birth of Christ and his imminent return. It challenges us to wait in the darkness of winter for the light of Christ to dawn. At Worth Abbey, the Benedictine monastery just down the road from me in West Sussex, the monks keep their walls free of decorations till Christmas Eve. This keeps them focused on the essence of their vocation which is to make room in their lives for what really matters. We would do well, this Advent, to do the same.