No comedy in dustbin death

Anyone who has followed all the twists and turns of the Barbican's Beckett Centenary over the past weeks must be feeling the weight of the existential burden by now.

Charles Sturridge's production of Endgame, the season's penultimate offering, certainly looks as though it is. At times Hamm and Clov seem so muted you worry they won't even make it to their final nihilistic anguish.

Which is a shame, as this piece, Beckett's own favourite among his plays, never shies from emphasising the comic aspects of humanity's tragicomedy. It is another one - or rather two, for let us not forget Nagg and Nell in their dustbins - of Beckett's partnerships in extremis, a vain hope that waiting for mortality will be made easier by co-dependency.

Although Kenneth Cranham cannot compete with Michael Gambon's recent definitive turn as Hamm, he engagingly endows this sedentary blind tyrant with both charisma and neediness. Peter Dinklage, famed for the film The Station Agent, struggles to find such cohesion.

With a gaze perpetually downcast, his sullen Clov displays no complexity of emotion. And in a place where people die of "darkness" but there are no more coffins, complexity is the order of the ever-repeating day.

Until 23 April (0845 120 7550).

Beckett Centenary Festival 2006: Endgame