THEATRE
Endgames ★★★
fortyfivedownstairs, until June 1
Three brief encounters with hideous men achieve a sense of twilit tragicomedy in the hands of the legendary Max Gillies.
The legendary Max Gillies stars in Endgames at fortyfivedownstairs.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
With Endgames, Gillies rejoins director Laurence Strangio to present what’s in some ways a companion piece to their 2018 production of Krapp’s Last Tape – this time uniting the late Beckett work Eh Joe with an excerpt from Jack Hibberd’s classic monodrama A Stretch of the Imagination and Chekhov’s shambolic lecture On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco.
Although Hibberd died last year, the curtain may long continue to fall on his immortal stage creation, Monk O’Neill. The misanthropic hermit in Stretch remains an incarnation of Australian male destructiveness and despair as appalling as he is compelling.
Hibberd used this character to diagnose cultural disease – from slashing misogyny to the rapacity and bad faith of colonialism – with a clear-eyed honesty that reshaped what was possible on our stages, and this excerpt includes Monk’s final will and testament, in which he gives:
‘all my lands and property, goods and chattels, to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia … On no account must my domain fall into the clutches of the predatory and upstart albino. I believe that the tides of history will swamp and wash aside this small pink tribe of mistletoe men, like insects …Change insects to dead leaves…’
One Tree Hill isn’t his to give, of course, and even Monk’s presence is erased in this version, largely an audio performance under crepuscular lighting.
With Endgames, Gillies rejoins director Laurence Strangio.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
Gillies only appears once, rifle in hand, pursuing “an emu on heat” through the shadows; the brilliantly produced soundscape, however, overfills the physical absence – not least in the copious, and comically loud, urination which bookends the piece.
If that whets the appetite for a proper remount of Stretch, the audio monologue in Eh Joe is part of Beckett’s creative intention. The elderly loner here sits entombed in silence on a couch, as the accusatory voice of a woman (Jillian Murray) torments him with memory and regret.
As he seduced women in his life, so this internal voice now seduces him towards death, and Gillies’ wordless performance haunts with barely perceptible pain and confusion, with the agony of futile presence.
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Gillies has always had a talent for clowning, and in the Chekhov, he leans into a more overtly satirical sort of existential monologue. Nyukhin is a nervy, ineffectual public speaker. The man is supposed to be giving a charity lecture on the evils of tobacco, but it keeps turning into a digressive complaint about his wife and daughters, whom he fears.
The actor fumbles his lines more than a few times, which matters less than it might when he’s playing a character who wishes he could erase his memory, and whose comical lack of authority is his defining feature.
Elegant visual design replicates the mysterious alchemy of language that ghosts these figures as they circle through worlds extinguished, or perhaps never lit.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
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