Owen Roe and David Bradley in Alan Stanford’s 2011 production of Endgame (The Gate Theatre, Dublin).
Stanley Cavell writes:
Solitude, emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, silence — these are not the givens of Beckett’s characters but their goal, their new heroic undertaking. To say that Beckett’s message is that the world is meaningless, etc. is as ironically and dead wrong as to say it of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Rilke, for whom emptiness or perfect singleness are not states — not here and now — but infinite tasks. Achieving them will require passing the edge of madness, maybe passing over, and certainly passing through horror, bearing the nausea Zarathustra knows or the vision of oneself as a puppet (“the husk, the wire, even the face that’s all outside”) as in Rilke’s fourth Duino Elegy — not protesting one’s emptiness, but seeing what one is filled with. Then the angel may appear, then nature, then things, then others, then, if ever, the fullness of time; then, if ever, the achievement of the ordinary, the faith to be plain, or not to be.
