WHERE Waiting for Godot is a play that can't begin, Endgame is a play that can't finish. The two amount to pretty much the same thing, a wry comment on the futility of existence performed as a wry comment on the futility of theatre. The irony is that the

deeper these plays sink into life's meaningless void, the more life-affirming they become.

Endgame is the more troubling, though. Here, on Kenny Miller's set, the stage lights hang with cobwebs, the walls are bare chipboard, and the costumes, stained and muddied, hint at better times long past. What's unnerving is less the relationships - the cruel interdependence of child and parent, master and servant - than the idea that outside there is nothing. One streaky window looks out on a motionless sea, the other on a

featureless landscape. This is a more fearful desolation even than the miserable life inside.

After all, where there is life there is at least the possibility of progression. And where there is Beckett, there is always humour, dry though it is. The play takes its title from the closing moves in chess, and there's something of the grandmaster tournament in the way the mobile Clov (a lolloping Brendan Hooper, face caked in grey mud) and the chair-bound Hamm (a resonant Simon Dutton in pyjama top and dress suit) spar their way through their snappy repartee. They are intelligent performances, at once witty and forlorn, with just an echo of the music hall.

Emerging from the bins in Robert David MacDonald's Circle Studio production, Owen Gorman signals his elderliness rather too much as Nagg, but Ida Schuster's Nell is in the great existentialist tradition of Beckett's women.