The Actor's Nightmare actress Ellen tells him that it is a Samuel Beckett play called "Checkmate" (which seems to have elements of the plays "Endgame", "Happy Days", and "Waiting for Godot"). Literally forced on stage, George attempts to improvise his lines; however, the play inconsistently shifts between scenes from "Private Lives", "Hamlet", "Checkmate", and "A Man for All Seasons". When forced to improvise a soliloquy in the "Hamlet" scene, George tells the audience that he was raised in a Catholic school and was interested in joining a monastery but they told him to wait until he was older. When he was older, however,
Krapp's Last Tape gratification of those very bodily appetites that, earlier, he had resolved should be out of his life. Eating bananas and drinking have become a [daily routine]. Of the physical activities that he once considered excesses only sex has come to play a reduced part in his lonely existence" in the form of periodic visits from an old prostitute. Although this is a play about memory, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp himself remembers very little. Virtually all the recollections come from the tape. As evidenced most clearly in the novel "Murphy", Beckett had a decent understanding of a variety of mental illnesses including