Endgame

The Gate Theatre, Dublin

CLOV, THE servant staggering through Samuel Beckett’s vision of what might be an apocalyptic future, or perhaps scenes from everyday life, once again sets his sights on the exit. “What is there to keep me here?” asks David Bradley’s cadaverous slave. “The dialogue,” replies his dependent tormentor Hamm.

Presented as the concluding part of the Gate's mini-festival of Beckett, Pinter and Mamet works, subtitled The Relish of Language, Alan Stanford's serviceable production presents a world where there is no more relish – no pap, sugar plums or painkillers either – but plenty of language to fill the space.

“Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together,” says the sedentary Hamm, a man inclined to etch his existence into a barren earth through speech. Hamm is here played by Owen Roe, but you have to take the programme’s word for it.

Concealed by the character’s usual stiff toque and dark glasses, Roe’s warm familiarity is further muffled by a substantial beard, as though restraining all charm for the sake of an overbearing character.

It would take a lot to soften Hamm, though, whose parents (Des Keogh and Rosaleen Linehan) linger nearby in dustbins, and whose salutation carries distaste for life: “Accursed progenitor!”

Bradley certainly looks the part, stiffly comic and physically eroded by routine on Eileen Diss’s entombing, dust-grey set, but his generic Irish accent frequently drifts to the north of England.

Although Endgameis heavily aware of its own artifice, with teasing self-reference to "ham" performers, something "taking its course" or the deep worry of Hamm's entreaty, "We're not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?" – it seems an odd distraction within a work so painstakingly placeless.

Yet Endgame's place is now squarely in the canon, revived frequently (by the Gate in particular) if rarely reinterpreted. Where Deborah Warner's recent Happy Daysamplified Beckett into exaggerated proportions and Sarah-Jane Shiels gave Act Without Words IIa political context without curtailing its meaning, here Stanford settles for understated, deferential reference.

Keogh and Linehan, amusingly sad and achingly funny, bring the subtext of their own professional double-act, while the swing door that allows Bradley’s surreally quick reappearances recalls the innovations of previous Gate productions as much as the quiet plea of Beckett’s poem Dieppe to “live the space of a door that opens and shuts”.

That is where Endgamecontinues to mean something, as stark and funny and true as words can be. The game we know may be stalemate, but Roe's Hamm sums up the Beckettian worldview with a snappy finality that Pinter and Mamet would admire: "The end is in the beginning and yet you go on."

Ends tomorrow