Endgame and Act Without Words (edit title)

• Rated 5 stars

“i love this book and i love the hidden meanings behind it
very beautiful ideas as the place they are in is like a skull because of the 2 windows and that all the play is taking a place inside a human skull, in his head
the 2 ashbins and the paralyzed hero i love what he signifies in the play many beautiful ideas about the world and the human being and they way he represent it is so great”

• Rated 5 stars

“Excellent! And it does make you wonder... it makes me wonder and wonder and wander into a story where the main characters are...what are they?... summed up, yet subverted, in one well placed line during the play: "We're not beginning to . . . to mean something?" Who can say? Who can say except Beckett? Beckett - the artist!”

• Rated 0 stars

“A revelation ”

• Rated 4 stars

“surrealism in literature/drama, definitely ahead of its game, but very good”

• Rated 1 stars

“Oddly, I wrote a paper my senior year of high school about 2 of Beckett's plays. Couldn't tell you now why I picked Becket or what in hell I said about them, though. I'm sure this play has some redeeming qualities, but I can't think of any offhand. He was an existentialist writer, but he went too much to the "existence is meaningless" side and not at all to the humanist side. It's bleak despair.”

• Rated 3 stars

“Beckett's second play "Endgame," translated from French by his own hand into English, is a vision of the world at its end. It focuses on the few surviving human beings who are themselves facing mortality; the betrayal they face from their own bodies as their physical forms break down and the end of life becomes imminent. I freely admit that I didn't understand everything Beckett was doing in the play, with fragmentation, repetition, extensive pauses within the dialogue, and allegorical referencing. I looked into educated sources on the play and found that there are allusions to the death of Christ and to Dante's "Inferno," which upon reflection become clearer to me now. I also recognized allusions of my own, particularly the parallels between the slave-son Clov and Prospero's savage servant Caliban: Clov's relationship to his father-owner Hamm is more forgiving and less vile than that between the two men in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," but the similarities are definitely there. Specifically, the line from Clov -- "I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others" -- harkens back to Prospero and his daughter Miranda giving the man-beast language and understanding.

Beyond the allusions are Beckett's own personal ideas about life and death, loneliness and family, powered by a fairly pessimistic and dark view of the ultimate fate of humanity and humankind. As a main player in the philosophical ideology and existentialist movement of The Theatre of the Absurd, his stance makes sense. The world within his play IS absurd, as well as meaningless and a bit inhumane. So, making sense out of non-sense is the key to the reading experience -- or, refusing to make the attempt to unravel the play in order to find some common understanding and just choosing to go with the flow of dialogue and action that is presented. I tried a little of both, which was frustrating and challenging while still being somewhat enjoyable.

The companion piece to "Endgame" is "Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player," which borrows motifs, characters, allegories and tone from its predecessor. While it might be much more effective and interesting if seen in performance, the actual reading of five pages filled with nothing but repetitive, tedious stage directions is less than a fulfilling experience. But the main event, "Endgame," is the reason for this book, and if you want a taste of that absurdist, existential playwriting that Beckett and Ionesco made famous, this and "Rhinocerous" are good places to start. I haven't read "Waiting For Godot" but plan to read that one, too, before the month is out. (Read 2/08)”

• Rated 0 stars

“The absurd play "par excellence"; Derision continously flirts with pathos to give something very close to ..fun
I enjoyed reading this play. ”

• Rated 5 stars

“I don't know why necessarily, but I do love the Absurdist plays. This play is a bleak and endless tale of what? A man gone insane? The end of the world? It's truly open to interpretation. Never have I seen this performed (though I hope to), but the reading of this play is fabulous. Be warned, there are no trite happy endings and dreams of romance, this is a truly Absurd (the movement) play.”

• Rated 2 stars

“Weird. I don’t think I got it. I liked it to a certain extent. I felt that it was a attempt to explore existential angst and exploring modern relationships in a metaphorical manner but I could just be making that up. Maybe the whole point is seeing your own ideas in it.”

• Rated 5 stars

“This is just the second of beckett's that I've read, after godot... I read this and then read martin essli's commentary on theatre of the absurd... he looks at the whole play as a dramatisation of dialogue and conflict within one individual ... seen that way it seems like an astonishing literary tool! wish I could write something like this”