With two imprisoned within the small bare stage-space and two bin-bound, each fancies an imaginative space in preference to their present oppressive existence: running into the woods (Hamm); a world where all would be silent and still (Clov); a day when Hamm will really need to hear my voice (Nagg); 'Ah yesterday!' (Nell).

The youth and mobility of Clov is ever a painful reminder for Hamm of what he has lost. His aged parents are a fearful embodiment of Hamm's future. All are subject to inexorable decline. Beckett's focus is on the oppressive human condition that all presently endure. His concern is not with any realistic characterisation or development.

HAMM

Like his parents and Clov and all who ever had dealings with him - his former 'pauper' tenants, Mother Pegg, the man who begged 'bread for his brat' - we find Hamm's presence overbearing and tyrannical. Ever irritated by his parents, he cruelly feeds a hard dog biscuit to his toothless father. 'If I could kill him I'd die happy,' Clov swears.

However, the present moment has brought him to a point of reckoning. Not only has he been felled physically but he is also plagued by guilt for 'All those I might have helped'.

As a shield against his remorse Hamm immerses himself in his compulsive storytelling, pompously postulating on the subjects of life and death in a self-justificatory, self-congratulatory ('Nicely put, that') manner, and frequently indulging in literary allusions delivered in a pretentious literary register. If the stage is all his world now, he consciously performs to his imaginary audience (and us) with his comments on soliloquies, asides, complications and underplot. After all, the only thing that keeps him here, he muses, is the dialogue.

Clov: Let's stop playing.
Hamm: Never!

At the point when it seems 'our revels now are ended' for this fallen Prospero, his opening line of 'Me - to play' develops into a painful recognition that he has never yet succeeded in playing the game of life through to its ultimate end: 'Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.' To end his suffering, death - which, of course, can never characterise the present, conscious moment - can only be desired: 'If I could drag myself down to the sea! I'd make a pillow of sand for my head and the tide would come.' Nor can he will physical breathing to end - 'If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with' - and so living persists.

The only exit that Hamm can take is theatrical. With a grand flourish, tossing his whistle and compliments into the auditorium, he declares:

Hamm: Since that's the way we're playing it ... [he unfolds handkerchief] ... let's play it that way ... [he unfolds] ... and speak no more about it ... [he finishes unfolding] ... speak no more.

He finishes, or nearly finishes, as he has tried before, acknowledging the handkerchief 'curtain' that ever falls and rises on an endgame that he wishes, futilely, would end with a checkmate rather than stalemate.

CLOV

Clov dutifully enacts all that Hamm would do and see, as a complementary bodily extension of Hamm's will. Clov cleaves slavishly to his sadistic master:

Hamm: You can't leave us.
Clov: Then I shan't leave you.

Yet he ever dreams, sadistically, of a cleavage that might free him from the abuse he is forced to endure:

Clov: If I could kill him I'd die happy.

The only reason he does not kill him is that Hamm alone knows the combination of the larder.

'Your dogs are here' declares Clov as he presents both himself and the toy dog before Hamm.

Each is utterly reliant on the other, as inseparable as mind and body:

Hamm: Gone from me you'd be dead.
Clov: And vice versa.

'When I fall I'll weep for happiness' dreams Clov but the curtain falls on Clov's dream of escaping, leaving him motionless by the door, precisely positioned for their next performance.

NAGG and NELL

The parents who once abandoned Hamm as a tiny frightened boy are now duly discarded and binned, with Nell dismissed as a 'blathering …drivelling …damn busybody' and Nagg accused of being an 'Accursed progenitor' responsible for bringing Hamm's suffering existence into being.

Now Nagg can only nag: 'I hope the day will come when you'll really need to have me listen to you, and need to hear my voice, any voice. [Pause.] Yes, I hope I'll live till then, to hear you calling me like when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the dark, and I was your only hope.'

Already buried in their bins, the rough Nagg and gentle Nell are forced still to endure the painful farce of living, day after day, separated by their metal barriers. The happiness of yesterday that was a romantic boat ride on Lake Como is long gone.

Nagg's recourse to his tailor story is but a tired attempt to relieve their unhappiness. Nell remains impassive, having heard the tale so often before. Her tragic despair might be softened for us by their comical popping up and down in their ashcans but their suffering is nonetheless something that profoundly wearies Nell:

Nell: [Without lowering her voice.] Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But -
Nagg: [Shocked.] Oh!
Nell: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

Nagg finally sinks back into his bin, wondering if Nell has escaped living, but the next time he knocks on her lid the lid will lift and her head will appear, for day after day this farce continues.