The fact that two of Australia’s major theatre companies are performing Endgame concurrently is, one hopes, merely a coincidence and not a reflection on the national Zeitgeist, for the play is one of the bleakest works in Samuel Beckett’s not exactly sunny canon. If Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot cling desperately to some hope, their counterparts in Endgame, Hamm and Clov, have long since given up. It has been said that Waiting for Godot is a despairing play about hope and Endgame a despairing play about despair. But it is more accurately a play about the aftermath of despair, the torpid calm that comes after one has passed through the slough of despond and all that is left is to fill the hours with bickering and pointless gamesmanship. As Hugh Kenner has pointed out, Endgame is a play about performance – the performance of despair rather than despair itself. If we believe in a chaotic godless world, ‘whatever we do, then, since it can obtain no grip on our radically pointless situation, is behavior pure and simple; it is play acting’.