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 eighty degrees to make coitus possible in the position he is in!'"––a position that Rosette Lamont proposes also "suggests that of a suckling babe." Beckett would not be 69 until 1975 so, from his perspective, with Krapp a proxy for him, the action is set in the future. The first line of the play explicitly sets it 'in the future', although nothing onstage reveals this. Beckett wrote this play shortly before he turned 52 years old. As it happens, with "Waiting for Godot", success had found him but, at 39, the future must have seemed a lot bleaker for the