Samuel Beckett is unquestionably the greatest playwright of the second half of our century. But he was always a minimalist, exulting in making do with less even as he strikingly evoked the daily depredations of existence on our decreasing potencies. He allowed his characters to do less and less, as his dramatic means became more and more stripped down. No further paring down is possible, yet Beckett continues to whittle away. In the corner into which he has deliberately painted himself, he can only bang his head against the wall; but the stunning éclat of this metaphysical head-banging has dwindled, with repetition, to a dullish thud….

[Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, and What Where offer an] orgy of self-denial, a feast of physical and spiritual askesis in which outer and inner agencies combine to render human beings ever more crippled and downtrodden as they are being translated into non-being…. Late...