
Starting with Endgame: Four Acts by Calla Videt
Editor’s note: Last fall, Calla Videt ‘09 worked on a professional production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame with Complicite, an ensemble theater company in London. This week, Harvard Arts Beat is running Videt’s four-part behind-the-scenes series about her experiences. You can read the introduction HERE. Today’s installment is ACT IV, the final post of the series.
Act IV: Endgames
4:30 pm: Short tea break. Refueled with biscuits, we return to sugar-plums and the idea of tension from the morning. Mark and Simon McBurney begin to play while attached together by a string. The string replaces the bamboos from the morning exercise and seems to simultaneously express both need and power. It brings out a new tension emanating from the center of the space. “There are threads here and there, always in the story,” Simon says. Perhaps he means it in two senses, with these literal physical ‘threads’ exposing nonliteral thematic connections in the text.
We turn to Nagg listening to Hamm’s story, also with string between the two actors. Simon demonstrates how Nagg’s act of listening can change the tension in space. The string slacks and tightens. Slacks and tightens.
It’s almost the end of the day. We’ve come to the end of the story. We return to the question that began the morning. “What the hell happens next?” Simon asks. The most Beckettian of all questions thus far.
6 pm: Time to break for the day. Throughout rehearsal, a clock ticks fluidly in the background—a nod to Beckett but also as a constant reminder that the show must open in two short weeks. But, all in all, things are pretty relaxed.

- Faces on the wall. PHOTO: Sarah Ainslie
The play is about the present, or the present-ness of what is unfolding on the stage. And so, as the faces on the wall—members of the dead—look on, we concentrate on the here and now.
All the games played and questions asked are little doorways of revelation. Such is the rationale behind the French word for rehearsal—“repetition.” For, through a series of repetitions, comes a series of variations. In a way, our rehearsals are a way of understanding the infinite number of ways we might proceed from moment to moment so that when it goes in front of an audience, one iteration might emerge for that night alone. The next night, another—with one thing preserved: the spirit of play.
While Beckett can sometimes appear somewhat serious on the surface, there’s a comedic edge to of his work and a dark pleasure in his pain. Similarly, amidst rigorous attention to the work, there is constant mischief afoot in the room of a Complicite rehearsal. “Will you all please stand up. Please—stand up!” Simon beckons us all to stand. A possible impromptu game? We all obediently rise to our feet. Long Pause. The face of Franz Stangl stares down from the wall. With a sly grin, Simon continues, “You see?” he cheekily demonstrates the idea, “Power.”
Ah, good. Another game. We, the duped players, sit back down.
Here’s more about Calla Videt and about Complicite.
Here’s the Harvard Gazette story about Calla Videt’s senior project The Space Between, which was performed last year at Harvard.