Endgame Author:Samuel Beckett The reception of Samuel Beckett's new play has been precisely what the admirers of Waiting for Godot would desire. Endgame 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 i... more »s a poet: and the business of a poet is not to clarify, but to suggest; to imply, to employ words with auras of association, 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 so dangerously simple dialogue of Endgame does...Mr. Beckett shows us a mystery outside the grasp of any other dramatist now writing...The feeling which Mr. Beckett epresses on the stage is a note hear 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 ryhthm. For that reason, Endgame, so mournful, so distraught, is a magnificent theatrical experience....« less