Endgame, like Waiting for Godot has its echo of The Tempest. But where Lucky remembered divine Miranda, Hamm derisively recalls the world-weary Prospero: 'Our revels now are ended. (He gropes for the dog.)' The difference is of a piece with the difference between Waiting for Godot and Endgame. The latter is at once a bleaker and a more perplexing play. Vladimir and Estragon have their basic health, for all their disappointments and discomforts, whereas Hamm is confined to a wheelchair, blood intermittently flowing from his head, and Clov is stiff-limbed, unable to sit down. Pozzo and Lucky degenerate physically in the course of the earlier play, but their situation is never so extreme, so dehumanised as that of Nagg and Nell, immobile in their ash-cans. The bare stage of Godot, with its focal tree, is an open metaphor for anywhere, at any time, but those ash-cans and...