Aaron Monaghan and Rory Nolan take on Beckett: ‘To understand Endgame is to understand that you can’t understand Endgame’

“I don’t even know when we met, but I remember the moment I liked Rory, around 2007 … It was years after I met him,” Aaron Monaghan says as Rory Nolan breaks into skits of laughter. “I think I saw him in everything, and there was probably, if you were to psychoanalyse it, a jealousy there,” he continues. “I still think Rory is the most gifted actor I’ve ever come across.”

“Would ya stop!” Nolan splutters. “This is an interview. She might print this.”

“It’s nothing I haven’t said before, or publicly,” Monaghan replies, pushing on with his declaration of actorly love. “He has an amazing facility to do anything … I was very serious as [a young] actor, too serious. You have to be doing this; you must be doing that. And then Rory would come out and just make it all look so easy and effortless. You would not see the effort that he was putting into his stuff behind the scenes.”

The actors are in a small glass office at the Digital Hub in Dublin, talking about a working relationship and a friendship, because Nolan is playing Hamm, blind and in a wheelchair, and Monaghan his resentful servant, Clov, in Druid’s new production of the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, for Galway International Arts Festival.

When you arrive, and walk along a corridor to meet them, two oversized dustbins – which Bosco Hogan’s Nagg and Marie Mullen’s Nell will inhabit – down the end are a dead giveaway for what they’re rehearsing with the director Garry Hynes, in a mock-up of Francis O’Connor’s set.

Nolan and Monaghan are far removed from the tyrannical master and listless servant they segue into later. Two outstanding actors of their generation, they have performed together multiple times, particularly as part of the Druid ensemble of actors, most recently in last year’s DruidO’Casey.

They do plenty of work separately and have stuff going on outside acting; Monaghan is artistic director of Livin’ Dred Theatre Company, in Cavan, and Nolan made his writing debut last year, with the tragicomic You Belong to Me.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Druid’s magnificent new staging of the O’Casey trilogy should be a source of national pride ]

They are also clearly very good friends: familiar, affectionate, analytical, thoughtful, having the crack. Observe the body language, turned slightly towards each other, instinctively understanding what the other is getting at.

Nolan has been listening to this openness. On the face of it he’s the joker and Monaghan the earnest one, but they have more in common than is immediately apparent, and their yin and yang buzz both on stage and in conversation. “This is turning into some sort of …” Nolan says. “This is ridiculous. The feeling is absolutely mutual, because Aaron was the apex predator, so to speak, of all the other actors. He was getting the big parts from a very early age in the Abbey, and he was always brilliant …

“When we met and got on so well, we realised, God, we’re pinging off each other: we’re having a good laugh.” On stage, “we kind of become almost symbiotic, the relationship that we have … I can see Aaron in rehearsals. He’s going, ‘Oh my God.’ And that makes me go, ‘Oh my God.’ Because we know it’s coming …

“It’s very rare to have someone who you can work with so closely, that is completely on the same wavelength in all the right ways. And also will challenge you in all the other ways. So if I don’t see something I will say to Aaron, ‘Just stand out of this and have a look at this,’ or ‘Have a listen,’ and he might do that to me as well, if we’re maybe struggling with a scene.”

Watching them rehearse a section with Hynes, you see that ease and challenge – an intimacy among the three – made flesh.

A lot of connection comes from the Druid ensemble, too, says Monaghan; they talk about working as part of that collective of freelance actors who have worked together on several projects, starting with DruidMurphy, a suite of plays by the late Tom Murphy.

“We all revered Tom Murphy, so much,” Monaghan says.

“We still do,” Nolan responds.

“We felt the pressure, and the honour, of that: ‘We need to get this right,’” Monaghan says. “So a lot of the time any sort of politeness kind of went out the window. Because we all love him so much we worked our [arses] off. Then a huge mutual respect, not just for each other but for each other’s work.” Nolan adds, “And respect for how different we are as well.”

“Garry went, ‘That’s special. We should keep this going,’” Monaghan says.

“Murphy’s work and that project created the ensemble,” Nolan adds. “And it’s brilliant stuff. It’s dexterous. It can be difficult, but it’s hugely rewarding. He’s just a genius. The strongest steel’s forged in the hottest fires. That work was intense, joyous and fruitful. I think we all came away with a much better understanding not just of his work but of ourselves as actors – if that doesn’t sound too wankology.”

In their early careers there were far more Irish professional theatre companies, and plenty of work. “People were taking chances on younger actors, and we were getting big parts in our early and mid-20s. That’s where you cut your teeth,” Nolan says. After the crash, companies didn’t take risks in the same way, instead employing the tried and tested.

Both observe that, in terms of maturing as an actor, having children brings a compartmentalisation that gives focus. “When my first son was born, theatre work and doing plays became a secondary thought,” Nolan says. “I felt my work got much stronger, in a weird way, because it wasn’t the be-all and end-all.” After Monaghan’s daughter was born, “you’re jumping out of bed in the morning – ‘I have something to do with my day.’ You’re providing. When you go home you’re inundated with lots of life. Bizarrely, when you’re in work here, all that goes away. Work becomes more focused.”

After working elsewhere, coming back to the ensemble “just feels like you’re home”. There’s the group’s familiarity with each other, as well as Druid’s “model-box presentations”. Endgame’s model box was in February, a day when the whole team gets together and “everyone has their shake”, set and costume designers share ideas, and they talk things out. After that it’s “fermenting in our heads”. For Nolan, it means rehearsals in week one are “fertile ground. You know the motor is going to fire on all cylinders.” For Monaghan, “it shapes your idea of the play and the production. Sometimes a model presentation can be such a massive shift in your head.”

Monaghan adds that the crew at Druid “are the fifth Beatle”. Nolan says “they’re the best crew in the world. They’re the unsung Druid ensemble, too, that we have a shorthand with.”

Although the pair are great friends, they aren’t in daily contact. Nolan jokes, “I’d ring him after two weeks: ‘You don’t love me?’” Like in the play. He quotes: “‘You don’t love me … You loved me once.’ That’s kind of familiar to us.”

Which leads us to the question of what Endgame is all about.

“That’s the question that stops you,” Monaghan says. “It is what it is. It’s about four people locked in a room. It’s about dependent relationships. Greater brains than us have for 50 years been trying to find meaning, and there’s no concession on that.

“We are not at all concerned with meaning, certainly not in this first rehearsal room. When we were doing [Waiting for] Godot” – Druid’s production toured nationally and internationally from 2016 to 2018 – “I was definitely very intimidated by, ‘What does it mean?’ I had kind of run away from Beckett. He’s academicised, and there’s an ownership over him. And in the doing of Godot over three years” – he played Estragon – “I think I began to understand it. I can’t explain it.

“In approaching Beckett this time, I don’t have that fear. Because it just is what it is. He literally gives you a very, very specific set of things to do. And when you do it, something happens. What the audience take away from that is so diverse. Leaning too heavily on any particular meaning in any particular line will rob the audience. What we are finding in our approach is to just do what the man says. And it has a meaning for the audience.”

Nolan agrees. “To understand Endgame is to understand that you can’t understand Endgame.” He says he’s paraphrasing Theodor Adorno’s essay Trying to Understand Endgame. “We did 300 or whatever performances of Godot” – Nolan played Pozzo – “and I always heard something else. It never got dull. The thing about Godot or Beckett or Endgame is, the closer you think you’re getting to understanding him, the further he eludes you. To pin it down is doing it a disservice. Endgame, it’s like a mystery play. But we’re not here to solve the mystery. We’re here to explore it. It’s like life: no one knows the meaning.

“With Beckett we are just here. They lay out their stall at the start of the play, in speeches.” He races through a snippet, including stage directions. “‘It’s time it ended, in the refuge too. And yet I hesitate to.’ He hesitates. ‘I hesitate to … end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended. Yet I hesitate to … to end.’ He sort of ruins you for other plays.”

Rehearsals moved to Galway this week. Nolan calls this going into conclave. “It’s like the world outside dissipates, and it’s just distilled and concentrated work. The actual bones of the piece happen sort of osmotically.” Although members of the ensemble are freelancers based in Dublin, it’s important for this process, and for the company, “that Druid is based in the west of Ireland, that it’s located in Galway, and reaching out to the world and being a touring company”. Galway rehearsals are part of the Druid methodology. It’s “like being sequestered into some sort of commune. You might even run a bit [of the play] in the evening. We’re working together; we’re practically having breakfast together. You’re immersed. It’s actually fun.”

Monaghan is energised by the intense living-rehearsing experience. He recalls rehearsing all four DruidShakespeares – the epic condensation of history plays from 2015 – simultaneously in eight weeks. In the evenings they’d be “still talking about the work you did that day, or the work that had to be done the next day, and you could find yourself at midnight, having a cup of tea or eating or having a beer, having the absolute crack talking about the work. I remember feeling at that time, ‘Oh, I don’t want this to end.’ It just seemed like we were always working – and, as Rory says, it’s still great fun.”

They talk about continuity and about the ensemble doing what Nolan calls “part of this amazing evolutionary cycle in Irish theatre”: O’Casey, Synge, Murphy. “When we’re doing Beckett there’s elements of Synge, there’s hints of O’Casey,” Nolan says. “He can’t not have been influenced. He was only born when the riots happened in 1907. He was there for the riot for The Plough [and the Stars] in 1926. There’s no way he wasn’t informed. He’s writing in a completely different time, after the second World War. There’s Murphy and the exactitude. As Tom used to say, obey the punctuation. It’s that same exactitude you find in Beckett. If you deviate from what he writes, it’s like a cake that doesn’t rise. It’s all about the tone, the exactitude of the pauses, the rhythm.”

In that progression, first with DruidSynge, in 2005, Monaghan “learned a lot from Marie [Mullen] and Garry about how to speak Synge, to go to the end of the line, and those big, big lines. Then we all learned so much more from the punctuation and the rhythm of Murphy when we started doing that. Everything we do in Druid is always about the writing.”

[ Fintan O’Toole, from the Irish Times archive: DruidSynge is one of the greatest achievements in the history of Irish theatre ]

Whereas people talk about what Druid does with a play, “when you’re in the [rehearsal] room, what Druid does is obey the writer. It’s lovely when you come away from a production and people go, ‘Wow, that was a great writer.’ And it’s not Garry’s vision or Aaron’s or Rory’s interpretation of that part. That comes out of Garry’s fastidiousness with revering the writer.”

“And one eye on the audience,” Nolan adds. “Garry spends an inordinate amount of time on the opening. Because it’s the audience’s first interaction with what they’re about to ingest. You become very aware this thing we’re doing only works with the people on the other side of the stage watching us. The audience is always there in the rehearsal room as well.” With Endgame, “we’re going through this meticulously at the moment. We’ve put Endgame into sections that Beckett himself proscribed in a production he directed – 16 sections – which is really helpful, working on it. Then we have to make it look like there are absolutely no sections.”

Monaghan talks about Druid’s programming continuity. “I don’t know if it’s deliberate on Garry’s part. The last time myself and Rory were on stage together was playing Joxer and the Captain, these two isolated figures on stage that felt very Godotesque,” at the end of Juno and the Paycock in the DruidO’Casey sequence.

“The O’Caseys were set 100 years ago, about the formation of the State. As great as they were, the most fascinating thing for me was that those two women find an independence from these men, I guess, but they’re walking out into a very, very bleak, Ireland, Catholic Ireland. And whatever is going to happen to Mary’s baby and whatever is going to happen to Juno, I don’t think it’s as optimistic as they think.

“Then O’Casey is written off by the Abbey in 1927, after The Silver Tassie, and the next big Irish thing that happens in theatre, as far as I can see, is Beckett.

“It’s interesting that Beckett is poles apart from Synge, and poles apart from O’Casey, but there’s something there: he’s definitely influenced by it. I remember thinking about Synge’s Well of the Saints that act two might as well be a Beckett play. The characters could be Nagg and Nell. When we keep all coming back to work together, these are touchstones or conversations or counterpoints.”

They agree there are through lines in Irish drama. Nolan says, “Remember Pozzo eating the chicken, and Garry saying ‘Playboy!’, and Christy eating the chicken.” Monaghan replies, “I don’t know how many times I’ve eaten chicken onstage in a Druid play.” Nolan declares, competitively, “I’ve spent more time eating chicken in Druid plays. Like, I don’t need this bloody fatsuit that I’m wearing!” “And it is a fatsuit,” says his friend. “You’re always paid to say that,” Nolan replies.

Druid’s production of Endgame opens at the Town Hall Theatre, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, on Tuesday, July 16th, with previews on Saturday, July 6th, and Monday, July 15th. It runs until Sunday, July 28th