Aspettando Castri: Finale di partita (Endgame)

A bourgeois Hamm and Clov are almost inconceivable, although Hamm refers to a time when he
was something of an overlord, Clov inspecting Hamm’s paupers “sometimes on horse.” The
play is almost always set amid post-war devastation and deprivation, as the text details. But here
they are, Hamm and Clov, played by Vittorio Franceschi and Milutin Dapcevic respectively, in
red velvet smoking jackets with satin collars and cuffs, Hamm with a tartan lap rug rolling
around polished checkered floors, black and white chess board tiles, in a sleek, Naugahyde or
pleather wheelchair, his stancher an elegant, crisp, white, jacket accessory, this couple looking
like gay fashionistas. The picture facing the wall, an oversized oil painting in this production (a
detail Beckett cut in his own productions as “trop recherché), sits atop an elegant, black fireplace
mantle in the great room of a once elegant Big House and is then moved to the floor along the
upstage wall. Devoid of furnishings, the set, the house, rather, remains grand. The walls
themselves are grey but with substantial white trim and black molding. The room looks freshly
painted. Inconceivable, we might say (to borrow the catch phrase from Princess Bride), but that
is how legendary Italian director Massimo Castri and his designer Maurizio Balò conceived this
story of deprivation and slow decline to a Finale di partita, but the imagery seems more Chekov
than Beckett. The play, in the standard Carlo Fruttero translation published by Giulio Einaudi
Editore S. P. A., opened at the Teatro delle Passioni in Modena on 30 March 2010 and has been
touring Italy’s wonderful Teatri di Stabili since, quite successfully, we might add. I caught up
with it at Teatro Elfo Pucinni in Milan in May of 2011.
Much of this production is then ill conceived and misconceived, a legendary director
taking on his first Beckett production and seeing it through his own lens. Nag and Nell are
astonishingly young and energetic, bouncy, even, for instance, the reptilian Nagg ferociously
testing the air with his flickering tongue. Deprivation is everywhere in the script, but visually the
laundry staff is apparently functioning just fine. Nagg and Nell’s garments are freshly cleaned
and ironed, starched even, as are those of Hamm and Clov, the single exception is the light
Ketchup stains that remain on Hamm’s handkerchief. In something of a Natural;istic touch,
Hamm’s gaff here is a fireplace poker, fine for adjusting burning logs in the fireplace, but Hamm
couldn’t use it to propel himself under the best of circumstances. But the hard drinking, chain
smoking Castri is an important director who gets the most from his actors, and his Finale di
partita won Italy’s “Premio Ubu” as production of the year in 2010 [news report of award:
http://www.teatrocasalecchio.it/home/finale-di-partita-premio-ubu-2010/] . And, one must say,
that the acting was superb, alternately tender and sadistic, at least from the principals. Nagg and
Nell threatened to bounce out of their oversized bins at each entrance like Jack and Jill in a box.
I was asked to contribute an essay for the program as originally planned and to offer a
lecture on the play at the University in Modena, mostly to students in the English literature
program, both of which I did. I watched some rehearsals in March of 2010, and even then, with
neither set or costumes fully in place, it seemed clear that Castri’s conception of the play would
be more personal than faithful, more Castri than Beckett. My essay opened with an overview of
the play, and this two-page prelude was translated and published in the original short version of
the program, but it must have suggested a certain incongruity since that description bore little
resemblance to what the audience would actually see in Castri’s production. In fact it probably
introduced a certain confusion. The longer essay was never translated, presumably because the
full program was never produced under the new austerity that has hit Italian theatres in the 2010
Berlusconi budget, but in the touring production even my short description of the play went the
way of Mother Pegg.
Castri’s Finale di partita reinforces the fact that Italian theatre remains very independent
and very much a director’s theater from Giorgio Strehler all white Giorni Felici (Happy Days) of
1981, Strehler’s only Beckett, with its mirror in the backstage so that we could see Willie in his
hole and Giulia Lazzarinie’s Winnie from two simultaneous perspectives, or, more recently,
Andrea Adriatico’s 2009 version of Giorni Felici with a scandalous Winnie of Eva Robin, where
she is set for a time amid apples and where the naked couple engages in something of a carnal
embrace. Such stagings are admittedly no more “loose” than Robert Wilson’s much stylized
and lauded rendition or Winnie’s plight, which recently played the Strehler Milano, still sacred
ground for contemporary Italian theater, and what some might call deviations tend, on the other
hand, to revitalize rather than diminish the work. Castri’s is not so daring, not so deviant,
frankly, not so creative, but his take on the odd couples of Beckett’s Finale di partita jars us into
recognition and reappraisal, stirs the imagination to wonder what is possible in Beckett’s theater.