Abstract
This chapter explores The Endgame Project’s 2012 production of Endgame, which starred Dan Moran and Chris Jones, two actors with Parkinson’s disease. Drawing on Beckett’s close familial connection with Parkinson’s disease by way of his mother May Beckett and his aunt Cissie Sinclair, this chapter explores the parallels that the company found between Parkinson’s as a degenerative disease and Endgame as a play centrally concerned with deterioration and decline. The Endgame Project embraced the script’s interrogation of bodily struggle and the threat of some inevitably encroaching “end”—and yet also threw new light on the play’s urgent forms of endurance, as both characters and actors enacted their own continued (ambivalent, precarious) survival. Here, I focus on the issues of bodily precarity, degeneration, and radical contingency that characterise both Parkinson’s disease and the characters’ situation in Endgame, while tracing the correlations with Parkinsonian symptomology, Beckett’s preferred acting style, and the radically contingent, precarious nature of live performance itself. Interviews with Moran and Jones close this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Beckett began work on Fin de partie in early 1955. He would continue working intermittently on the play throughout 1955 and 1956, and it would eventually be published by Éditions de Minuit in January 1957.
- 3.
Jean Martin has also recounted his research into and mimicking of the symptoms of Parkinson’s when constructing the character of Lucky in the première production of En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953 (Martin 1992, 28–29). In a strange coincidence, it was the similarly named French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot who would first coin the name “Parkinson’s disease” (in 1872 in French, and in 1877 in English), after reading English surgeon James Parkinson’s seminal 1817 work An Essay on the Shaking Palsy (Toodayan 2018, 386).
- 4.
Whitelaw’s mother died only a few months before Rockaby rehearsals began. Hugh Culik has also pointed to the concordance between May’s speech and gait patterns in Footfalls, citing Beckett’s mother May in the later stages of Parkinson’s as a possible biographical source for the text (2008, 145).
- 5.
See Chapter Two for more detailed discussion of the relevance of Beckett’s preference for physiologically rather than psychologically based acting methods in this context.
- 6.
The term “degeneration” is used in this chapter to denote the specifically bodily process of deterioration in the individual’s physiological functioning. For exploration of Max Nordau’s nineteenth-century conception of “degeneration” as the worsening quality of the human race in relation to Beckett’s work, see McNaughton (2018), Salisbury and Code (2016), Purcell (2015), and Maude (2008).
- 7.
Carel’s focus is on chronic illness rather than disability per se, but her theorising of illness bears close relation to most conceptualisings of disability: she distinguishes between “illness” and “sickness” on the grounds of durational chronicity, with illness being “serious, chronic, and life-changing” and “not followed by complete recovery within a short period of time” (2018, 2). The terms “illness”, “disease” and “disability” overlap repeatedly but not consistently across commonplace usage, and can only be distinguished provisionally at best, with many case-by-case caveats. Indeed, as suggested in the differing terminology of “disease” in the term Parkinson’s disease versus “syndrome” in Down syndrome and Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinson’s itself sits uncertainly on the murky line between illness and disability.
- 8.
Science writer Jim Schnabel’s description of Parkinsonian degeneration chimes uncannily with Hamm’s monologue in Endgame, including in its second-person address:
The first thing you notice might be a slight twitching in your finger. You imagine that it will go away, but it worsens, turning into a tremor of your hand and eventually your entire arm. Your ever-clenching muscles begin to feel stiff, sore and weak. You find it harder to lift things. In time, you become reluctant even to get up from a chair and walk. Your posture begins to slump forward. Your gait shortens. Your speech slows. Your face, once expressive, becomes an immobile mask. (2010, S2)
- 9.
Endgame actor Nabil Shaban likewise observes that, if “Endgame is about decline, the decline of the faculties”, this is “something that happens to every single one of us: no matter how much we were able-bodied, we all are going to come to that” (interview, 2017, Chapter Two).
- 10.
My thanks to James Brophy for his help with this translation.
- 11.
Representative examples include Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden (1911), Oliver Stone’s film Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jojo Moyes’s novel Me Before You (2012), and Andy Serkis’s film Breathe (2017), all of which follow the logic that “success or failure in living with a disability results almost solely from the emotional choice, courage, and character of the individual” (Longmore 1987, 72). I model the term “compulsory optimism” on Robert McRuer’s concept of “compulsory able-bodiedness”—the assumption that “able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for” (2006, 9), that able-bodiedness is not only the presumed norm but also the baseline of recognisable humanity—which McRuer in turn models on Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality” (1980, 631–60). See also Patrick McKelvey’s formulation of “compulsory non-disabledness” (2019, 72) and Beth DeVolder’s “compulsory heroism” (2013, 746–54). Also relevant here is Thomas Thoelen’s convincing reading of how Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951) refuses common tropes of the disabled individual “contained within sentimental representational frameworks” of pity and uplift—a sentimentality which in fact “facilitates social violence by dehumanizing those towards whom it is directed” (2020, 312).
- 12.
For a relevant examination of “inspiration porn”—the framing of disabled individuals’ activities as an uplifting source of motivation or “inspiration” for abled-bodied observers—see Young (2012, 2014) and Haller and Preston (2017). See also Yael Levin’s astute interrogation of how “attempts to normalize or reframe disability by employing models of achievement and overcoming” collides with how insistently “Beckett clearly denounces the idea of achievement; his art conjoins failure, impotence and ignorance with physical and mental disability” (2018, 170).
- 13.
In his most recent autobiography, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality (2020), Fox reflects on the limits of his own determinedly cheery perspective on his condition: “Have I oversold optimism as a panacea, commodified hope? […] I try to make sense out of this shit-show, but none of my all-purpose bromides and affirmations serve the moment. There is no spinning this. It’s just pain and regret. There is no finding the positive” (160, 3).
- 14.
See Chapter Four for further discussion of how the possibility of Jess Thom undergoing a Tourette’s “ticcing fit” in performance produced a similarly generative tension in her Touretteshero production of Not I.
- 15.
Happy Days, dir. William Foeller, Whole Theatre, 1989–1990.
- 16.
Bill Irwin is a Tony Award-winning American actor and comedian, particularly famed for his vaudeville and professional clown performances. He played Lucky alongside Steve Martin and Robin Williams in the 1988 Lincoln Center Waiting for Godot, and wrote and starred in the single-hander On Beckett (2018–2022).
- 17.
The Cherry Orchard, Classic Stage Company, New York, December 2011. Directed by Andrei Belgrader, and featuring Dianne West, John Turturro and Alvin Epstein.
- 18.
A Month in the Country, Classic Stage Company, New York, January–February 2015. Directed by Erica Schmidt, and featuring Peter Dinklage and Taylor Schilling.
- 19.
Niall Buggy is an Olivier Award-winning Irish actor whose stage work includes Krapp’s Last Tape (Leeds Playhouse, 2020), Trevor Nunn’s joint production of Eh Joe and The Old Tune (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2020), and Charles Garrard’s film version of That Time (2000).
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Simpson, H. (2022). The Endgame Project: Me to Play, 2012. In: Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4_3
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