Endgame by Samuel Beckett - Flabbergast Theatre on reimagining Beckett's Endgame at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Flabbergast Theatre return to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with their first full-scale production since their critically acclaimed Macbeth in 2022, taking on Endgame by Samuel Beckett. Combining their signature physical style with clowning, puppetry and striking visual theatre, the company breathes new life into Beckett's portrait of four people trapped together at the end of the world. Set against a bleak, dying landscape where the characters cling to ritual, memory and one another, the production promises a raw and visceral take on the twentieth-century classic. We caught up with Artistic Director, Henry Maynard to find out more.

Flabbergast's work is often described as anarchic, while Beckett's writing can feel incredibly precise. Did you find those instincts pulling against each other during rehearsals, or did they prove surprisingly compatible?

In order for real anarchy in performance, you have to have structure; we felt obliged (and legally compelled) to pursue the writer’s precise vision, but also, we trust him. His stage directions, even his line readings, always helped us release the anarchy of the relationships and of the strange, demented emotions of the play. There isn’t a word out of place. That constraint has been a rich pleasure.

Endgame is full of repetition, routine and small rituals. What opportunities did that give you as a company whose work is so rooted in physical performance?

We worked with our movement director Matej Matejka, whose work derives from ritual, rigour and gesture, and this meant the work was rich with physical opportunities to open up counterpoints and subtextual imagery. The whole play is a series of routines, which are the clown’s equivalent of rituals. Beckett’s genius is the linking of the two, so we felt Matej’s work was a perfect way of excavating these.

You've described the production as visually striking and shaped by clowning and movement. Were there any images or theatrical influences that became important reference points for the piece?

We dug into the context of the play’s writing through our dramaturg Ralph Jeffries, who opened up the precision of Beckett’s thinking and how he composed the play - the refuges of WWI France, the colonial Irish town of Kov, even previous drafts that were somehow more absurd. We are already lovers of Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, of Chaplin and we love Ionesco and Genet and the absurd dramatists that emerged after WWII. Maguy Marin’s extraordinary May-B, perhaps the definitive Beckett performance work, was often on our minds.

Flabbergast have worked extensively with masks, puppetry and chorus work over the years and your work often asks audiences to lean in rather than sit back. What kind of conversation are you hoping people are having as they leave the theatre?

Probably it will have worked if it takes time for the audiences to find words again, after all, the whole thing is about the collapse of meaning. Nonetheless, we hope it points people towards their closest and most difficult relationships, reminds them of their parents, grandparents, and of the moments of care or grief they might have experienced.

It's often said that Beckett wrote about the end of civilisation, but many people see Endgame as strangely hopeful too. Where do you stand?

It’s definitely about the end of things, about inevitable and inescapable failure. We live in a time where narratives of happiness and success dominate our culture and distract us from the realest problems, like light distracting us from darkness. In Beckett maybe we could say that the darker the night, the brighter the stars. What remains, for us, is a strange flicker of hope, but it only comes when language, meaning and all the relationships have collapsed. No redemption. Just endurance. And people trapped by their own imaginations.

One of the joys of watching Flabbergast is never quite knowing what's going to happen next. How do you create that sense of surprise with a play that's been performed and analysed for almost seven decades?

Thank God theatre is the art of the present; through movement or through the unknowing of clown, we are interested in the live encounter, the sweat, the cracks, the relationship between actor and audience. Endgame just happens to be an extraordinary arrangement of those human problems and encounters - people then can argue with us about our choices, our interpretations, but hopefully if we’re doing our job, they will be present with us, and we can analyse in the bar together after.

What do you think makes the text continue to resonate in 2026?

It’s a play about people trying and failing to love each other after a kind of cosmic, universal, world or nature collapse. Take your pick of catastrophes from the past 20 years to occur on a global scale - 2008, Brexit, Trump, Covid, Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, wildfires - and take your pick of the problems in the UK, Europe and the world that seem ominously to predict yet more and more catastrophe. We’ve not learned, have we? We’re not learning. We seem collectively to care for the world and each other, but we find it hard to change how we live to account for each other.

Endgame by Samuel Becket will be performed at 6pm at Pleasance at the EICC from 5^th – 30^th August (8:30pm on 27^th)

Booking link: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/endgame-samuel-beckett