Endgame

Samuel Beckett apparently liked productions of his own plays to be as colourless as possible: a truly unremitting prospect for 'Endgame', an existential parable which is so bleached of local colour that it seems be set in a grey area somewhere near the end of the literary universe. Purists may disapprove of the vivid emotional shades in Simon McBurney's striking Complicite production. But, for audiences condemned to wait with the actors at the brink of the last abyss, they bring relief to Beckett's bleakest landscape: even Tim Hatley's design makes unhealthy pinks, greens and blues glow like hallucinogenic mould on the grey surfaces.

Mark Rylance and McBurney himself are lurid and extraordinary as blind tyrant Hamm and his slave Clov. Rylance brings the sadistic glamour of an ageing rock star to his role as chair-bound Hamm: even when he's immobilised from the waist down his gestures echo an indelible personality. McBurney's Clov seems like a stiff-legged worker from an entirely other world: both are brilliant intuitive actors but they inhabit their roles so completely and differently, with Rylance taking bow after flamboyant bow at death's door while McBurney stumps around the stony limits of despair, that Beckett's odd couple seem more inexplicable than ever.

'Endgame's' gruesome foursome is completed by Hamm's parents, ageing amputees whom he keeps in dustbins. Miriam Margoyles and Tom Hickey suffuse the pair with woefully rosy tenderness: they bloom here like mutant old roses in their metal pots. Their deaths and Clov's impending departure are the only events on what some have seen as a post-nuclear horizon. Whatever your take on it, 'Endgame' is a play that demands a lot of actors and audiences, forcing the actors to perform near the end of speech and movement and the audience to watch without the consolation of entertainment. Such austerity is not for everyone: but you're unlikely to see a better quartet perform Beckett's last semi-paralysed dance.