Discovering Endgame

Unlike The Homecoming, I'm afraid I don't have a humourous tale to tell about how I stumbled on it out of nowhere like a fart in the wind while pinching off my daily loaf.......y'know, I have no idea why anyone would ever call me crude.....anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, no funny story.

Originally, I had planned to direct '4:48 Psychosis' by Sarah Kane, a beautiful piece of theatre about clinical depression and suicide. It was gonna be all experimental and hardcore, I was really excited about doing it. Then Joe and Faridah approached me and asked if I would consider doing a Beckett play. Now, prior to this the only Beckett play I had read was 'Waiting for Godot', which I liked but not enough to wanna stress myself out directing it. So I pretended to all agreeable and said that I would look through the other plays and see if there was any other Beckett play I liked.

I went through the complete works and frankly, just wasn't into it. I mean, they were good plays but I just couldn't connect with them. Maybe it was the fact that I already had other plans, or maybe I felt like I didn't know enough about Beckett to really take the search seriously. Maybe I said yes to stall from ultimately saying no. Yeah, maybe.

I talked to Joe and basically told him that I hadn't made my mind up yet but that I really wasn't feeling it. He nodded, told me to go with my gut and that was that. A couple of hours later, I started thumbing through the Beckett works again and started re-reading Endgame. And for whatever dumbass reason, I shit you not, the second time round, it totally cracked me up. I left it for a day, then went through it again, and this time it made me cry. In the office. True story. No one saw. Thank Christ.

The more I read it, the more I related to it on a personal level, very similar to how 4:48 Psychosis affected me the first time. It hit home on a lot of feelings I have towards life, love, family, the fucking world. Another thing that really attracted me to the idea of doing it was that I had no idea how I was gonna do it which totally freaked me out and turned me on at the same time. And it also happens to be Beckett year this year so what the hell! That's how it happened, and so here we all are, back at the deep end once again, where the water's warm, and the sharks are waiting.....they're waiting.

Be back in a bit with stuff about the cast.

Peace.