Endgame. The title evokes that moment in chess when few pieces are left on the board, when the end is nigh but neither player can be confident of victory; the sense of an ending looms, but any hope of catharsis or resolution feels indulgent and premature – futile even. When the first words spoken are ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished’, we know we are in a truly liminal space, one that may never be resolved.

Endgame (Fin de partie, 1957)was written, like Samuel Beckett’s other acknowledged masterpiece Waiting for Godot (1953) in French: in order to strip the native Irishman’s work of subconscious affectation, to force him to think and write more fundamentally, he once told the New York Times. Of course, it is no accident that existentialism itself was communicated in this language. Camus and Artaud are often cited as influences on Beckett, even if this was as much a consequence of proximity as ideology. Ionesco and Genet were certainly prosecuting similar concerns, albeit from different vantage points. The result in Beckett was a sparseness that bordered on religiosity – or, in this case, atheistic monasticism.