Beckett is the great master of less is more, of the fertile silence and the echoing nuance; no other living dramatist is so free of cant, sentimentality and verbal fuss.

If he now sometimes gives the impression of parodying himself or, less harshly, of working and reworking familiar materials, it doesn't much diminish my pleasure in his work. (p. 123)

Ohio Impromptu, which was written for and first performed at Beckett's seventy-fifth birthday celebration at Ohio State University a couple of years ago, is a two-character piece in which a reader, R …, reads to a listener, L …, a tale of love fading and finally dead. The first line is "Little left to tell"; the last is "Nothing left to tell." Between those so characteristic utterances lies the story and something more: the fact and nature of storytelling itself, of literature, something composed, sent out, received.

Visually, Ohio Impromptu is striking, if a little portentous…. The two men sit at right angles to each other at the end of a long table, in the center of which is a black wide-brimmed hat. Both have long white hair and are dressed in long black coats; they shield their eyes from the light and remain almost immobile throughout, except for an occasional rap on the table by L, which serves to start the reading again after a pause. The men are mirror images of each other, the point being that so are writing and reading: the tale told, the tale heard.

Catastrophe is dedicated to Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright, and is perhaps Beckett's most overtly political work…. The piece reminded me of Kafka's story "The Hunger Artist" …, and of the Pozzo and Lucky speeches in Waiting for Godot: the mind at the end of a rope, intellect enslaved.

If any of these plays is self-parodic it's What Where. The characters are named Bam, Bim, Bem and Bom, and there are lines like "We are the last five" (there's Bam's "voice" too) and "I am alone. Time passes. That is all." The shadowy characters move in dim light enacting a tale of some mysterious assignment to get "him" to say "it" after having been given "the works." "What must he confess?" is asked several times but never answered.

A clue is that the main figure, a prosecutor or inquisitor, keeps editing his words. He says something, expresses displeasure at it, starts again, calls it "good" and goes on. Another allegory of writing and reading, with "the works" referring to an ouevre and also to the old gangster term for murder, the point being that writing and literature can be used to deceive and oppress. I won't push it. The play's last lines are "That is all, Make sense who may." Even in this slight, rather forced exercise. Beckett is too dense and both grimly and playfully enigmatic to be forced into single meanings. (pp. 123-24)