Samuel Beckett

An autocratic Director (Harold Pinter) and his Assistant (Rebecca Pidgeon) put the final touches to the last scene of some kind of dramatic presentation, which consists entirely of a man (John Gielgud) standing still onstage.

A 1963 TV film directed by Michel Mitrani.

The woman Winnie sinks deeper and deeper into a large pile of manure while talking to her husband and spouting an endless stream of trivialities. This is the simple plot of Samuel Beckett's world-famous classic of the theater of the absurd.

Follows the "Beckett on Film" project, which produced film adaptations of writer Samuel Beckett's nineteen stage plays. The documentary features excerpts from the "Beckett on Film" versions of "Not I", "Krapp's Last Tape", "Endgame", "What Where", and "Waiting for Godot".

The camera swoops down on a circular area, seemingly suspended in space. It is filled with medical waste and other trash. A labored exhalation is heard. Then it stops. Then it starts again, culminating in a windy, dying sigh.

Performed at the Royal Court Theatre on 16th January 1973

Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning.

A performance of Samuel Beckett's 'Endgame', a play in which nothing happens, once - unlike Beckett's first play 'Waiting for Godot' in which nothing happens twice. It is not a play about chess, in any explicit sense, but it does feature a lovable if curmudgeonly old man in a dustbin. Generally accepted to be Beckett's bleakest play - indeed after it's 1957 English debut at the Royal Court, the TLS's Olivier Todd quipped that it made Waiting for Godot look like "a cheerful operetta". However, Beckett himself described it as "the favourite of my plays." Although the programme was not broadcast until 1991 it was recorded in 1989 prior to Beckett's death and had his blessing. This production is particularly notable as it is first full-length television performance of the play.

A reader tells a sad story to a listener, who only knocks in response.

An experimental exploration of the storied play. Becket’s vision of perpetual uncertainty, anxiety, and loneliness is refracted through our current moment.

In Krapp's Last Tape, which was written in English in 1958, an old man reviews his life and assesses his predicament. We learn about him not from the 69-year-old man on stage, but from his 39-year-old self on the tape he chooses to listen to. On the 'awful occasion' of his birthday, Krapp was then and is now in the habit of reviewing the past year and 'separating the grain from the husks'. He isolates memories of value, fertility and nourishment to set against creeping death 'when all my dust has settled'. One part of 19 parts for series "Beckett on Film" featuring filmed versions of Beckett plays, some screened at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival and some on Channel 4 television in the UK in June 2001.

Winnie, buried to her waist, follows her daily routine and prattles to her husband, Willie, who is largely hidden and taciturn.

An adaptation of Samuel Beckett's absurdist drama. An ordinary woman lives her humdrum life half-buried in a pile of dirt; her husband is partially visible behind her. She goes through her daily routines, ever hopeful that this is going to be a happy day.

Winnie, a woman in her fifties, is buried waist-deep in a mound of scorched earth, with just a large, black shopping bag and a collapsed parasol. Behind her and hidden from view sleeps Willie.

Somewhere sits two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a man named Godot. Internationally acclaimed Swedish TV dramatized version of the classic stage play.

Come and Go is a free adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s minimalist play, reimagined as an experimental film. This cinematic interpretation brings Beckett’s absurdism to life through visual language, navigating the blurred borders between reality and illusion. With a distilled aesthetic and rhythmic pacing, the film explores the quiet tensions, repetitions, and silences that define the human condition evoking a world where presence and absence continuously shift.

Cantonese adapted version of ‘Waiting for Godot’ staged in Hong Kong

There are five survivors in a futuristic library. Bam is their supreme dictator, and has the others interrogated and tortured, believing them to have said where. What Bam means is unclear, but he distrusts all.

Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same material of the avant-garde exercise. Surprisingly, a joke, repeated three times, each time everything sounds fresh and develops into an almost verbatim adaptation of the biblical "Book of Job" - a spectacular point in a parable about how hard to empathize with other people's misery, when you have your own.

Two derelicts occupy themselves as they wait for 'Godot' to make an appearance on Pozzo's estate.

This play is adapted from the last full-length novel by Samuel Beckett, also one of his most obscure works.Set in a boundless wilderness, the story follows an unnamed narrator crawling forward. On his journey, he encounters another wanderer named Pim, and an absurd yet tense relationship gradually develops between the two.In the end, Pim chooses to flee, leaving the narrator alone once again.

A recital of passages from the works of Samuel Beckett, performed by Jack MacGowran, as a raving old man.

The land is filled with people in urns chattering at top speed, but only to themselves, not to one another. The focus goes to three people: a man, his mistress and his wife.

An anthology of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known.