Georgina is an ambitious young London professional who learns she has only one month left in which to conceive a child. After exhausting all possibilities with her baby-phobic boyfriend, Georgina turns to her wildly optimistic friend Clem, with whom she sets out to identify and "land" the perfect father for her child.
The land is filled with people in urns chattering at top speed, but only to themselves, not to one another. The focus goes to three people: a man, his mistress and his wife.
A reader tells a sad story to a listener, who only knocks in response.
An autocratic Director (Harold Pinter) and his Assistant (Rebecca Pidgeon) put the final touches to the last scene of some kind of dramatic presentation, which consists entirely of a man (John Gielgud) standing still onstage.
A young woman sits down in a chair. Only her mouth is visible as she begins to speak at a rapid clip, describing events that she insists did not really happen to her.
An old woman in a rocking chair listens to a disembodied voice (her own) that recounts her life and that of her mother's. When the voice stops, she calls for more.
Hamm is blind and unable to stand; Clov, his servant, is unable to sit; Nagg and Nell are his father and mother, who are legless and live in dustbins. Together they live in a room with two windows, but there may be nothing at all outside.
The camera swoops down on a circular area, seemingly suspended in space. It is filled with medical waste and other trash. A labored exhalation is heard. Then it stops. Then it starts again, culminating in a windy, dying sigh.
Two tramps wait for a man named Godot, but instead meet a pompous man and his stooped-over slave.
An adaptation of Samuel Beckett's absurdist drama. An ordinary woman lives her humdrum life half-buried in a pile of dirt; her husband is partially visible behind her. She goes through her daily routines, ever hopeful that this is going to be a happy day.
Two bureaucrats discuss the potential suicide of a man standing perfectly still in front of a door that opens into the night sky and a fatal drop.
In Krapp's Last Tape, which was written in English in 1958, an old man reviews his life and assesses his predicament. We learn about him not from the 69-year-old man on stage, but from his 39-year-old self on the tape he chooses to listen to. On the 'awful occasion' of his birthday, Krapp was then and is now in the habit of reviewing the past year and 'separating the grain from the husks'. He isolates memories of value, fertility and nourishment to set against creeping death 'when all my dust has settled'.
A hot, thirsty man in the desert is tormented when the things he needs drop from the sky only to disappear again or hover out of his reach.
An old blind beggar and an old cripple in a wheelchair meet on a desolate street corner. The latter proposes that the two form an alliance, but the men are not destined to get along together.
As the rain patters outside, an old man talks to himself about birth, death, funerals, lamps, missing pictures and "loved ones" - a term he perpetually avoids using.
On a strip of film exist a pile of clothes and two men in bags. The two men conduct their lives in isolation of each other: when one is awake, the other is asleep in his bag.