Hamm

Click here to listen to Hamm (a 17 minute Real Media streaming sound file.)

This is a live recording made by the Bavarian State Radio in 1983.

William Bouton, actor, violinist

Leonore Hall, piano

Samuel Beckett, text

William Osborne, music

As with most of the characters in our Beckett Program, Hamm can be interpreted in relation to Dante.   He is vivid example the intellectual pride that Dante saw as heresy and violence against God.  A blind cripple – he suffers a buried soul like Winnie, and violently expresses his contempt for all the hell surrounding him with the words, “Clear away this muck!  Chuck it into the sea!”  In Canto XIII, the forest of suicides, Pier delle Vigne demonstrates the exact and legal-sounding language of a careful, methodical lawyer whose sense of logic and justice was so trampled upon that he could no longer bear it.   Hamm’s world view is similar, but he maintains his dignity by refusing to end the game of life.