Beckett's. If I could ask him about the play, this is the first section I would talk to

him about.

The area where I felt that we accomplished the most with this production

was in the handling of the text. I believe that we were in large part successful in

rendering the text in a way that was both vivid and open. This was supported by the

physical work and environment which was conceptually open despite it's clarity.

The text work was very important to me personally. My background has

allowed me to come into contact with some of the work that has been done in the

last few decades, in freeing actors from the physical and rhythmic constraints of

psychologically, or naturalistically derived staging. Because of this work I am

reasonably confident in creating movement and a physical reality for a production

that is cohesive on it's own terms. However, I have been very frustrated in my

attempts to free up the text of a play, and allow it to have a theatrical life of it's own.

I was very pleased by the results we achieved with the text in ENDGAME and feel

that I gained much insight into this issue.

When an actor is able to find, or build, an approach to the text, which is not

an attempt to interpret the text directly to the audience, the text becomes free of any

assumptions about the character's psychology that the actor may have. What is

important is that the alternate approach must be in some sense dynamic enough to

hold the attention of the audience, and on a technical level it must answer the

musical needs of the text. Simply draining the words of meaning and playing them

as notes, works no better than filling each utterance with import and reducing the

text to it's purely semantic function. The truth lies somewhere in the difficult,

terrain between, and as soon as it is grasped it slips away and has to be found anew

for each line.

This insight was brought home to me in a palpable, practical way through