Beckett’s work has become increasingly topical. Over the past six months, comparisons between the British government’s Brexit negotiations and Endgame have cropped up regularly in the press, and Waiting for Godot has been staged at the Irish border between the counties of Cavan and Fermanagh. Prior to that, Beckett’s canonical plays on stasis, inaction and circularity were regularly evoked in accounts of the Syrian Civil War and articles describing the endless plight of Syrian refugees. And prior to that, the idea that ‘this’ – any international crisis or difficult episode in European or American politics – ‘is like Waiting for Godot’ provided many journalists with some convenient one-liners. Everyone is waiting, nothing happens, and no one knows what to do: who else but Beckett can help us think about that?