by Samuel Beckett
Originally written in French, then translated into English by the author himself, the play "End of the Game" draws a parallel between the final stage of a chess game, when the result is already known, and the last stages of life.
The play centers on four characters who live cloistered in a space outside of which nothing remains, as if after an apocalypse. Hamm, blind and helpless, is confined to a wheelchair; his servant or son, Clov, is in a state of perpetual agitation, in permanent conflict with Hamm, unable to calm down or go elsewhere, to free himself. Alongside the two, who remain together for incomprehensible reasons, Nagg and Nell, Hamm's parents, live their lives in garbage cans. Their only happiness is the memory of the past; dehumanized and dependent on Clov, they seem incapable of understanding the present outside of the suffering they are experiencing.
Thus, a small world with its own laws, with a cyclical existence, is shaped, in which the characters are trapped in an eternal routine. Death seems imminent and yet the characters' discussions are empty, banal, conveying nothing. In the good tradition of the theater of the absurd, language is not used for the purpose of communication, but disaggregates, is eccentric and sterile.
The play has no authentic ending, neither in a dramatic nor interpretative sense, but remains open. No one wins the game, which will be resumed, in identical terms, the next day.
