Some of them arrive all too soon; others feel like they’ll never come at all. Some of them are happy, others horrifying. Some come with a twist, some with a dread inevitability. They may involve the use of gods and machinery, a song, or a clarification. Many are memorable, few are satisfying and yet all of them are guaranteed.
Every act of theatre has an ending.
How do you know when you’re done? “An end is that which itself naturally follows some other thing but has nothing following it,” said Aristotle, who, as theatre’s first theorist, had the luxury of stating the bleedin’ obvious. But how often can you really imagine nothing more to follow? Even Oedipus, cursed and blind at the end of his story, returns for the sequel. And when the couples are wed or the corpses have mounted in Shakespeare, there’s still so much more to be said.
One reason that play endings fascinate us is that in life we rarely get them. Oh, sure: we die – and hopefully in an Aristotelian way, of natural causes – but we rarely get the satisfyingly bloody crescendo and scrappy sense of task completion that rounds off Hamlet. Whether they go out with a bang or on a damp squib, the end gives everything that preceded it a shape, a finally perceivable definition. Endings make us whole.
"This is what we call making an exit," says Clov, the indentured servant in Beckett's Endgame, without the urgency of someone pursued by a bear. Just like the tramps in Waiting for Godot ("Yes, let's go"), Clov is really going nowhere. You'll find finality in Beckett's work, a world of last tapes and no more painkillers, but his dominant note is unbearable endurance. An ending doesn't have to be a conclusion.
Ibsen liked to finish on a gunshot or slamming door; Chekhov with an anti-climax; Miller with his title fulfilled; Synge with wild lamentations; Wilde with an epigram, Shaw with a lengthy explanation; O'Casey with provocation; Friel on the threshold of inevitability; McPherson with redemption; O'Rowe with explosion; Carr with a symbol; Sondheim with a cymbal.
Is it telling that Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, now revived by Druid, is occupied with bringing one character's ceaselessly repeated story to an end, while his new work, Brigit, a prequel, actually supplies it with more backstory? As with Enda Walsh's ballyhooed Ballyturk or The Walworth Farce, some stories are loathe to close, forever circling, but their characters will only be freed if they make it to the finish line.
And how about these famous last words: “If we shadows have offended . . . ”; “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”; “Hell is other people” – If playwrights tend to save the best for last, contemporary theatre makers, suspicious of the ring of anything too finely honed, end so often with a song, adding some of the oomph and none of the poetry. But it doesn’t have to end this way.
An ending often comes with a shudder, just as Tom Stoppard's Guildenstern compares death to "an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight". But, loitering in the wings of Hamlet, that play also recognises (and represents) something more hopeful: that every exit is an entrance somewhere else.
For those who joined this column over the years, wondering, as I did, what we could learn from theatre, those seem like encouraging words to end on.
