Endgame by Samuel Beckett (1957)

"Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished." So Clov begins, and for the rest of the hour nothing finishes. Hamm is blind and cannot rise from his chair; Clov can walk but cannot sit; Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell, surface from two ashbins in the corner to bicker and remember. Outside the two small windows the world has gone gray and still. The title is borrowed from chess, the phase when the outcome is already decided and only the last empty moves remain, and Beckett means it exactly: these four go on performing their rituals and small cruelties because to stop would take a certainty none of them can find. Nell says nothing is funnier than unhappiness, and she is right; the play is savage and very funny at once. Beckett makes one room hold the whole strange labour of an ending that refuses to end.