The first thing to notice about this production of Endgame is the silence. Fred Maynard as Clov clumps alone around the stage for a good three minutes, his clunking limp creating a rhythm that echoes as a kind of metronome throughout the whole play. Theo Hughes-Morgan, as Hamm, sits immobile in the middle of the stage, a blood-stained rag over his face. Each of the four characters gradually comes to life - if this stark, post-apocalyptic existence can be called life - and an aching sense of the past in the face of the future is created.

Hughes-Morgan is excellent as Hamm: the opaque round spectacles that obscure his face for most of the show enforce a curious expressivity in his motions which, as an immobile protagonist, the play must rely on. A raised finger by him can create the suspension before he explodes in pointless, brief rage. In Endgame, it is the details that count, as the characters simply exist in their stifling and claustrophobic arena. The discipline of these actors is startling: the play is an exhaustive two hours long, without any interval, and half the cast spend the entire play in a dustbin. All respect due to Hannah Malcolm as Nell, who somehow manages to stay still inside until needed, whereupon she pops up with some of the best facial tics of an old person I have ever seen. Maynard sustains a pronounced limp throughout without caricaturing himself as an Igor-esque servant, and Will Chappell (as Nag) acts with a peculiarly laboured speech which perfectly denotes the weariness of the play.

With so many characters rendered immobile, the dialogue is its most important attribute, yet as Clov points out, 'the words that remain have nothing to say'. Time is bent as the play circles around itself. Under the sepia light, the stage gradually fills up with props, and the characters engage themselves in trivialities which are a waste of time, yet simultaneously remind us that time is all they have and do not need. As one character says, 'Yesterday?! What does that mean, yesterday?' The set is well designed and the costumes perfectly imagined, Nagg's hat being particularly wonderful. The drawback of this play is its exhausting nature: it is two hours of relentless existence, and the purposeful pointlessness does begin to grate after a while. It is, however, darkly amusing as the cast explore the hilarity of unhappiness.