Theatre: Endgame (★★★★½)

by Samuel Beckett
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Director Andrew Ross
Set and costume Tyler Hill
Lighting designer Mark Howlett
With Geoff Kelso, Caroline McKenzie, Kelton Pell and George Shevtsov
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until June 11

 The set and lighting designers Tyler Hill and Mark Howett achieve a remarkable effect in Andrew Ross’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
Behind a grimy, littered yard and the ochre-stained façade of a crumbling house they have engineered a background of such impenetrable blackness that, try as I might over the 90 minutes of the play, I could not distinguish the curtains, paint and manipulation of light that must have created it.
This void is a perfect metaphor for Beckett’s bleak vision, a place like some freezing ocean abyss where no light penetrates, time has no meaning, the pressure is crushing and creatures – fish with no faces, skeletal crabs like vast spiders – eke out their less-than-lives with no chance of dignity, let alone redemption.And in our time, when clowns and vagabonds operate out of the biggest houses and even the oceans can no longer save their wonders, we need people who can stare into the black void and search for its meaning.




Read the complete review in The West Australian