Veteran actor Max Gillies returns with a trilogy of monologues, collectively titled Endgames.

That’s an adroit summary of where the misanthropes he’s interpreting are at. It also references a play by Samuel Beckett, whose characters Gillies describes as his “staunch companions” in this show’s program.

Among them is the title character of Krapp’s Last Tape, which Gillies and director Laurence Strangio successfully staged in 2018 at fortyfivedownstairs.

They return to this venue with another Beckett monologue also laden with off-stage audio, Eh Joe, and give Jack Hibberd’s classic Australian monodrama, A Stretch of the Imagination, an audio makeover.

Max Gillies: Endames. Photo © Jodie Hutchinson

That means Gillies really only has to remember the text from Chekhov’s On the Harmfulness of Tobacco. It’s a judicious approach for an octogenarian actor, who also has the benefit on an interval in this 90-minute program.

Unfortunately he had difficulty remembering several lines in the Chekhov on opening night. Endgames’s audio-visual driven first half is also not entirely satisfying.

The show opens with an excerpt from the play by Hibberd, with whom Gillies collaborated in the 1970s at pioneering experimental theatre co-operative, Australian Performing Group. That included twice playing...