Henry Maynard answers our questions ahead of Flabbergast Theatre’s Endgame heading to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

In their first full-scale Edinburgh Festival Fringe production since their hugely critically acclaimed Macbeth in 2022, Flabbergast Theatre bring their anarchic physical style to Endgame by Samuel Beckett; a brutal, funny and visually striking portrait of four people trapped together at the end of the world. Set in a bleak, dying landscape, the characters cling to ritual, memory and one another. Flabbergast transforms Beckett’s bleak world with clowning and highly physical performance. We chat to director and actor Henry Maynard about Shakespeare, laughing so you don’t cry and the rhythm of Beckett’s language.

Flabbergast Theatre has become synonymous with bold, visually inventive Shakespeare productions. What was it about Beckett’s Endgame that made you think, "This is the one we need to do now" for your return to the Fringe?

We’ve had a good phase of Shakespeare after Clown, Puppetry and Immersive work, we believed it was time to move on into new territories; we’ve wanted to do Endgame for many years, and we were lucky the rights came through earlier this year.

Endgame does seem to be a natural fit for Flabbergast's fascination with grotesque comedy, ritualised behaviour and the uneasy relationship between horror and laughter. Which parts of the play spoke most directly to those interests? And why do you think audiences laugh at some of humanity's darkest moments?

It’s funny. It’s brutal. The philosophy of laughter is a strange one, but pain and cruelty often make us laugh because they release a stress intrinsic to all of us - the struggle in hierarchies of life and family, how small we are, how futile things feel. We either laugh, or we cry. Often they’re not very far apart. Definitely the relationships spoke to us; in fact, the first time Simon (Clov) and I (Hamm) read the play in a dressing room in Inverness we almost wept with laughter. It felt, in many small comic ways, to reflect the tawdry and cynical parts of our own relationship.

Beckett's world is famously stripped back, while Flabbergast's work is often associated with physical intensity and visual invention. What was the process of bringing those two sensibilities together?

Physical intensity suits Beckett in the tension that comedy requires; the characters are wrought with pain while they struggle in choler. The stripping back is its own struggle, but necessary to bring the tone out - in performance and design. In terms of visual invention, there’s no need when the writer is a) a genius and b) incredibly prescriptive.

Many people arrive at Endgame expecting an intimidating literary classic. What do you hope surprises audiences most about your production?

It’s funny, it’s psychologically raw and the language is really musical. It’s a pleasure to listen to and yes the twists of logic are bizarre and resist simple interpretation, but that is the gift of the play which speaks to us in a time saturated by messaging… it provokes an audience, while carrying them through humour and pain.

Stewart Lee described your Macbeth as 'everything you want from a fringe show'. Did that success make this production feel more liberating, or more daunting?

Both probably; that Macbeth took many years of struggle and development and we are grateful for all the audiences that are taken in by it because we’ve given a lot. It’s a gift to be given the opportunity to play this, and on the platform we have - but it’s a mountain to climb, not to mention the vagaries of the fringe itself.

This is your biggest Fringe presentation to date, with a full festival run in a 375-seat venue. Beyond the obvious logistical challenges, what changes when you make work for a much larger audience?

Maybe the responsibility changes, elements like clarity, emotional storytelling and modulation… but we all make shows for a larger audience, it’s just a question of whether they find us.

Endgame has been interpreted since 1957. Nearly seventy years after it premiered, people are still arguing about what Endgame means. After living inside the play for months, do you think Beckett intended us to find answers, or simply to keep asking the questions?

“Ah, the old questions, the old answers…”; it’s not clear whether asking questions or finding answers is of any use to Beckett. Maybe it’s the routine that sprinkles some kind of elan on us, the play and dialogue of finding pleasure in logic and the rest. We do know he wrote it after a period of being by the bedside of his dying mother… so perhaps we could say that, in the face of the void, we can take pleasure in our terminal exchanges. Maybe they’re all we have.

Endgame by Samuel Becket will be performed at 6pm at Pleasance at the EICC from 5th – 30th August (8:30pm on 27th) Booking link: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/endgame-samuel-beckett