Endgame (play)

Endgame
2016 Gustavus Adolphus College production of Endgame
Written by	Samuel Beckett
Characters	Hamm Clov Nagg Nell
Date premiered	3 April 1957 (1957-04-03)
Place premiered	Royal Court Theatre, London
Original language	French
Genre	Tragicomedy

Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters. It was originally written in French (entitled Fin de partie); Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, opening on 3 April 1957. It is commonly considered, along with such works as Waiting for Godot, to be among Beckett's most important works.

The main character, Hamm, behaves badly. At the end, he is alone in an apparently depopulated world.

The English title is taken from the last part of a chess game, when there are very few pieces left (the French title applies to games besides chess and Beckett lamented the fact that there was no precise English equivalent); Beckett himself was an avid chess player.

In the Paris Review article "Exorcising Beckett", Lawrence Shainberg claims that according to Beckett the characters' names signify the following: Hamm for Hammer, Clov for clou (the French for nail), Nagg for nagel (the German for nail), and Nell because of its resemblance to the death knell of the deceased.

In his article, Developmental Psychology Re-discovered: Negative Identity and Ego Integrity vs. Despair in Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Cakirtas claims that Beckett's characters have contradictory and ambivalent relationships with each other. They are in search for their identity through their inner thoughts’ interaction with the external world—the world of ‘existence and non-existence’. They are in necessity for ‘trust’ and the relatedness between age and ego. Although these efforts are attempts to cover prospective contingency, the negativity of the past responds to the brokenness of the same life, in the same breath. Flashbacks turn identity search inside out, and the feeling of 'self-integrity versus despair' gains intensity in the process of old age. Needs vary from childhood to old age; accordingly, the reaction-based inferences relieve not only the ontological existence of the characters, but also their mental and spiritual beings. These reaction-based inferences lead sometimes to identity distortion, and sometimes bodily/physical depressions, and sometimes spiritual meltdowns; so, Beckett refers to the vital skills of the characters/ in modern/post-modern world order.