ABSTRACT
Among the projects left unfinished by the time of his death was Bertolt Brecht's retort to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which he considered to be the last word in social pessimism, an illustration of the state of despair to which capitalism reduces mankind. Beckett peeled off layer after layer of surface concerns - jealousies, traumas and political commitments - in order to arrive at the underlying states of feeling. Nobody has successfully managed to imitate Beckett, although many have tried. This is because the feelings which he expressed in theatrical terms seem so elusive, so much at the back of the mind, buried, hidden, almost beyond reach. In contrast, Samuel Beckett stayed with the paradox that Existentialism originally posed, of the free mind trapped inside an unfree body. It was a bleak but fundamental vision. The precision of Beckett's stagecraft, his artistry, made its impact elsewhere.
