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

★★★★☆

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).

Stewart Laing’s aesthetically pleasing and tart design augments the joke. Like chlorophyll fading away, the green of the bins is becoming an ashen grey. It’s Brexit rather than climate change that Endgame might be deemed to evoke, though, in one specific respect: the running out of “painkillers” is the most terrifying prospect in this world.

The female head that pops up from the plastic lid, like some grotesque morphing together of the Flower Pot Men and Mrs Danvers from Rebecca as retrained by the Addams Family, is that of Jane Horrocks. She has always had a fascinating range as an actor. Ab Fab and adverts with Prunella Scales jostle with Annie Get Your Gun and Sam Mendes’s Cabaret. She was wonderful at conveying a very down-to-earth, climbing-up-the walls sense of terror in Patrick Marber’s revival of Pinter’s first play The Room, in the recent retrospective season.

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In Endgame, she gets one of Beckett’s most perceptive lines: “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Nell concedes that unhappiness is such a regularity that it can be hard to keep the laughter fresh. The laughter is fresh in this production, partly because of the spruceness of the casting. As Clov, clumping around in white Crocs as he carts around his aluminium step ladder, Radcliffe adds pained, sarky slapstick to the theatrical skills he has learnt in his admirably intrepid post-Harry Potter life. His character has to look into the bins and laugh with a mechanical mirthlessness. That comes over as fresh, too – there is something wonderfully cock-eyed and thought-provoking to the idea of forced schadenfreude.

Cumming is brilliantly funny throughout, even managing to rise above a pair of prosthetic legs that put too heavy an accent on Hamm’s disability. They look as if they have been extruded via his Y-fronts (which are blue, since you ask) from a tube of toothpaste. Cumming has a superb drive; there’s an unholy life to the way this Hamm hams up his suicidal despair. It’s as if he is the grandiose epicure of rattled privation. His presence would be justification alone for Jones’s decision to include the rarely performed Rough for Theatre II.

But there are thematic and temperamental affinities between Endgame and this 50-minute sketch that make the latter an appropriate appetiser (if that is quite the word). Cumming and Radcliffe are again a double act – suited bureaucrats who put you in mind of a pair of recording angels. On the ledge of a high window is the figure of a man. Seen as a silhouette, he is alive but evidently contemplating suicide. As if they were weighing up the ins and outs of a dubious tax case, they adjudicate on what his final fate should be. There is ghoulish but rich pleasure to be had in hearing Cumming in full Scots flow (think Muriel Spark-meets-James Kelman) venting Irish paradoxes.

Beckett is full of paradoxes – not least that he has the bipolar person’s trick of having at once an inferiority complex and a superiority one. An un-ambivalent recommendation nonetheless, for this calmly crazed, beautifully cast evening.

Until 28 March at the Old Vic, London