MARK FISHER finds Theatre Workshop taking an unconventional approach to a Beckett classic

ALTHOUGH WE THINK of Samuel Beckett as a theatrical poet – his spare language sitting on the line between elemental and enigmatic – we shouldn't forget his visual flair. His vision of Winnie trapped from the waist down in a mound of earth in Happy Days can still draw breath – as it did at Dundee Rep recently – and the image of two tramps standing beneath a tree is forever associated with Waiting for Godot.

For this reason, it is all the more of a departure for Edinburgh's Theatre Workshop to have collaborated with Eduard Bersudsky's Sharmanka workshop on this staging of Endgame, Beckett's 1957 existentialist nightmare. In Robert Rae's production, the basic idea remains – Hamm, who can't stand, is dependent on Clov, who can't sit, while the aged parents Nagg and Nell, periodically emerge from their dustbins – but there's a difference in the execution.

Here, the misanthropic Hamm, played by Nabil Shaban, is perched in a kind of giant birdcage, a chamber pot beneath him, a bell above. Like the dustbins, it appears to be adapted from the wire mesh of supermarket trolleys, suggesting a landscape of post-consumerist desolation more than the nuclear apocalypse imaged by audiences in the 1950s.

Equally distinctive is the casting of Garry Robson, a wheelchair user, in the role of Clov. His supposed inability to sit becomes a trick played on the blind Hamm in a cruel battle of wills, the two of them deeply resentful of their co-dependency as they go through the interminable process of staying alive.

It's the kind of reinterpretation that would anger the notoriously pernickety Beckett estate but, although a tad confusing, it adds a layer of tension to an already fractious relationship.

If the production misses out on some of the play's bleak humour, it builds a suitably frustrating sense of time's slow and pointless passage and the casual cruelty of even the closest relationships.

Freed of his usual wheelchair, Shaban has a playful physical presence and, although he tramples on some of the language, he has an equally playful vocal dexterity. Robson is strong too in a production that won't send you singing into the streets, but might make you mull over the nature of things.

(Endgame can be seen at An Lanntair, Stornoway, on 13 February 2008, and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 15-16 February 2008)

© Mark Fisher, 2007

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