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,
Waiting for Godot on as a ringmaster—but Beckett dissuaded him: "I don't in my ignorance agree with the round and feel "Godot" needs a very closed box." He even contemplated at one point having a "faint shadow of bars on stage floor" but, in the end, decided against this level of what he called "explicitation". In his 1975 Schiller Theater production, there are times when Didi and Gogo appear to bounce off something "like birds trapped in the strands of [an invisible] net", in James Knowlson's description. "Because the play is so stripped down, so elemental, it invites all kinds of social and