USED: Endgame
By Samuel Beckett
Published by Grove Press, 1958
91 pages, paperback
From the publisher:
"The reception of Samuel Beckett's new play has been precisely what the admirers of Waiting For Godot would desire. Fin de Partie (End-Game) has outraged the Philistines, earned the contempt of half-wits and filled those who are capable of telling the difference between a theater and a bawdy house with a profound and sombre and paradoxical joy.
... Mr. Beckett is a poet: and the business of a poet is not to clarify, but to suggest; to imply, to employ words with auras of associations, with a reaching out toward a vision, a probing down into an emotion, beyond the compass of explicit definition. And this is exactly what the do dangerously simple dialogue of Fin De Partie does ... Mr. Beckett shows us a mystery outside the grasp of any other dramatist now writing ... The feeling which Mr. Beckett expresses on the stage is a note heard nowhere else in the contemporary drama. Beside his sorrow all the personal and political anguishes of an Anouilh, an Osborne or a Sartre are less than a crumpled rose leaf in the bed. He is without hope and without faith. But not without nobility; not without poetry; not without the balance and the beauty of rhythm. For that reason Fin De Partie, so mournful, so distraught, is a magnificent theatrical experience." -- Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times.
