It is a curious fact that perhaps the most famous lines in all of Beckett are contained in one of his least-known works, the 1983 prose piece Worstward Ho. ‘All before. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ These words, the ne plus ultra of Beckettian endurance in the face of existential adversity, have entered the culture in a way individual lines of few literary works have. In the context of this production, which transposes Beckett’s densely alliterative prose into a stage monologue à la the playwright’s somewhat more familiar ‘dramaticules’, they take on the weight of Hamlet’s soliloquy or Edgar’s speech in King Lear (a noted influence on the writing of Worstward Ho). To his credit, Robert Meldrum, the star of this production, neither throws the words away nor over-eggs them. Instead, as in the best of performed Shakespeare, he endows them with just enough meaning and rhetorical flair to see that they resonate anew.