Endgame by Samuel Beckett (1957). Originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, Endgame is considered by many critics to be the greatest single work by the Nobel laureate. A pinnacle of Beckett’s characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death. Tom LeClair writes: "I’ve seen many performances of Beckett’s play and read it numerous times, and yet I never tire of—and never exhaust—his drama of exhaustion. And repetition. At the end, the tragi-comic Hamm divests himself of everything but says “Me to play.” And the performance goes on the next night, and we go on despite all of our losses."
(TLeClair 6)