“It must be nearly finished…” Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as a lens for examining illness, caregiving, and bioethics
Thursday, October 12, 2023
9:45 AM – 11:00 AM ET
Location: Falkland (Fourth Floor)
By putting human complexities in front of audiences, theatre offers a framework for exploring lived experiences through metaphor and fictional characters. When that audience is made up of health professionals and trainees, theatrical texts and practices can offer insight into health, illness, caregiving, and bioethics.
In 1954, playwright Samuel Beckett learned that his beloved brother Frank had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Beckett, not in good health himself, immediately left Paris to tend to Frank in Ireland for several months until Frank’s death. This experience of caretaking and witnessing his brother’s slow death in the small Kilkenny house is reflected in Beckett’s absurdist tragicomedy Endgame, which is set inside a shack in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Samuel and Frank Beckett shared a passion for chess, from which the play’s title, a chess term, is derived.
The play’s characters include Hamm, a blind, domineering man in a wheelchair; Clov, Hamm’s servant and caretaker, who is not able to sit; and Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell, who live (and die) in garbage cans in the corner of the room. In this workshop we will examine Endgame for issues of disability, bioethics, and caretaking. Reading from the script, participants will contemplate the ways in which the play reflects their own experiences with illness and health care and the ways in which it opens conversations not represented in the play. Participants will leave this workshop with practical guidelines for using theatre in pedagogical settings, as well as in support settings for caregivers and others.