Daniel Radcliffe’s sarky slapstick is brilliant in Endgame, a stark vision of a post-apocalyptic world – review

Richard Jones’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s play is inspired

Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming star in the London production (Manuel Harlan)

★★★★☆

I mean it as no disrespect to either Greta Thunberg or Samuel Beckett when I hazard a guess that the great Irish writer’s plays are never going to be the environmental activist’s idea of a good night out at the theatre. Endgame is the one stage work to which she might be drawn, on account of its stark vision of a post-apocalyptic world of terminal wind-down. But Beckett’s take on this is existential. “Infinite emptiness will be all around you,” the wheelchair-using, theatrically puffed-up Hamm (Alan Cumming) tells Clov (Daniel Radcliffe), his lame, scuttling slave. “All the resurrected dead of all the ages would not fill it.” It wouldn’t exactly translate easily into a brochure for Greenpeace.

So the type of dustbin in which Hamm’s decrepit parents, Nagg and Nell, have been dumped is one of the several sly additional jokes that made me laugh out loud while watching Richard Jones’s inspired revival of Endgame at the Old Vic. With the effect of a drolly blast of blasphemy, this receptacle has become updated into a clean plastic item that you might buy to get on with some bright, born-again recycling. It conjures up the inconceivable picture of Hamm and Clov sorting out their refuse into the approved categories (go easy on those perishables, boy).