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 then remembers the girl on the punt, wrenches off the tape he has been recording, throws it away and replays the entire section again from the previous tape. It is a scene of masochism reminiscent of Croak in "Words and Music", tormenting himself with an image of a woman’s face. This time he allows the tape to play out. It ends with the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp determinedly not regretting the choices he has made, certain that what he would produce in the years to come would more than compensate him for any potential loss of happiness. Krapp makes no response to