Perhaps chronic depressives and melancholics should not expose themselves to Fragments. This characteristic quintet of short pieces by Samuel Beckett, selected and directed in his late, austere manner by Peter Brook, are steeped in existential bleakness and cheered by shots of black comedy.

Here, there and everywhere in this Beckettian dark night of the soul, all hope has gone missing, presumed dead. A little gallows humour alerts you to the survival of stoicism and flinty realism.

"Why don't you let yourself die?" asks Rough for Theatre's single-legged beggar, whose performance by Jos Houben is so coarsely face-pulling, eyebrow-raising and voice-contorting that it bordered on the indecent. "I'm not unhappy enough," retorts his blind beggar-companion (Marcello Magni). The two men, characteristically in Beckett, can neither get on nor part.

Fragments takes place in dusky limbo, that typical Beckett location. Kathryn Hunter's lyrical old woman in Rockaby envisages her life swinging to a close in her mother's chair. Selfscrutiny and self-mocking pessimism are given their head - "same old groans and moans from the cradle to the grave". The odd man out is the one possessed by manic joie de vivre.

In Act Without Words II, which faintly, comically echoes the plot-line of Happy Days, Magni and Houben live in huge, white bags, daily prodded into life each morning by a huge, wicket-like object. Magni's character scowls, mopes and mimes his domestic routine in worldweary bemusement as he takes his pills and finds putting on trousers a trial. Houben, whose grotesque clowning antics threatened to wipe the smile off my face, wears the face and frenzied manner of a tinyminded optimist.

The black-comedy key notes are best registered in Come and Go where three funereal old women, one played by a memorably vacant Kathryn Hunter, each by turn leave a bench, only to become the repository of a shocked, whispered secret by the remaining two. Fragments, too fragmentary for me despite its immaculate desolation blues, awakened longings for a blast of full-length Beckett.

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