for my final soliloquy"³³almost as if his guard is dropping near the end of the play

or he is dispensing with the pretense of fiction.

For both Jay and Rachel, it became important to play each moment as if it

was the last moment of the play. In Rachel's case it meant keeping the possibility

that Clov really would leave at any moment, alive and real. For Jay it meant

having Hamm repeatedly trying to end the play. In both cases we could play against

the fact that few people in the audience would know the play well enough to

actually know how much more there was. As the play progresses it becomes more

and more possible that each pause is actually the end.

The physical work on movement in the production was strongly informed

by the fact that Beckett had laid out the movement of Hamm and Clov as carefully

as he had laid out the text. The main problem became speed. As we accelerated the

text it became incumbent upon Rachel to move faster and faster. Given the amount

and detail ofbusiness prescribed for Clov, there is a certain logical limit to how fast

Clov can accomplish the tasks. The struggle with this physical barrier gave to Clov's

character a sense of agitation. Rachel's own difficulty keeping the business straight

and her resulting sense of stress, strengthened this sense. At the same time, this

difficulty kept Jay from being able to move the text as quickly as he would like,

giving him a sense of impatience and frustration that fit well with Hamm's cruelty

and brutal treatment of Clov.

The two most significant physical characteristics of Hamm and Clov

provided by Beckett are that Hamm cannot stand and that Clov cannot sit. There

are no clear reasons given for these constraints. But in creating the physical world

of the play, the nature of the characters' disabilities were critical. Since little else of