Cuban Theater Digital Archive

Literary antecedent (English,French)

Notes:

Endgame,play in one act by Samuel Beckett, written in French as Fin de partie and produced and published in 1957. It was translated into English by the author. Endgame has four characters: Hamm, the master, who is blind, wheelchair-bound, and demanding; Clov, his resentful servant, physically incapable of sitting down; and Hamm's crippled, senile parents, Nagg and Nell, confined to garbage cans. They all live in one room with two windows; from these Clov, at Hamm's order, views and reports on the dying of the Earth. The complex relationship between Hamm and Clov is the principal subject of the play. As is characteristic of Beckett's plays, the setting of Endgame is spare and the stage directions are copious. In its first American publication Endgame was bound with Beckett's brief pantomime Act Without Words, I, originally Acte sans paroles, I (first produced and published in 1957).