ENDGAME
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Was it that the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s work has aged badly? That the questions of the post-World War II writers–Does our existence have meaning? Why does the world seem so absurd? Is God dead, or merely on vacation?–no longer seem important as the memory of that terrible war is buried beneath the memories of more recent wars? I’m sure that’s part of it.
However, it’s hard to shake the idea that Endgame was probably never a particularly easy play to sit through. As an avant-garde novelist who turned to play writing fairly late in his career (Waiting for Godot, his first play produced, wasn’t written until he was in his 40s), Beckett was much more adept at writing plays that provoke interesting literary discussions (and countless academic papers) than he was at creating works that please an audience in performance. And Endgame’s dark, relentlessly bleak themes–death, decay, aging, the complete extinction of life as we know it–would unnerve almost any audience.
