Extract

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.

A blind tyrant sits in a wheeled chair at the centre of a bare room while his servant shuffles between two ashbins containing his legless parents. Samuel Beckett's 1957 play is claustrophobic in every sense: the world outside has apparently ended, provisions are running out, and the four remaining figures enact rituals of cruelty and dependence that may be all that is left of civilization. Hamm commands, Clov obeys and threatens to leave but never does, Nagg and Nell remember a rowing trip on Lake Como and fall silent. The comedy is bleak and precise, every pause scored like music. Beckett strips existence to its terminal condition and finds, in that stripped room, something unbearable and also stubbornly, irreducibly human.