The off-Broadway sensation, a tour de force for one man, is the most affectionate portrait of a character that Beckett has ever done: an aging man who lives a lonely and shabby existence in a darkened room. At year’s end he takes out a bottle of wine, a banana and his tape recorder, and he listens as his own voice of times past recounts the glories and hopes of his more youthful years. There is sharp, ironic contrast between the vibrant youth that he was and the shabby life into which he has declined.
