Play

Background

W2: Are you listening to me? Is anyone listening to me? Is anyone looking at me? Is anyone bothering about me at all?



Initial narrations of the story of lust, adultery and betrayal are tellingly juxtaposed by the spotlight's inexorable editing. Given no opportunity to deliberate upon what response might be made to the light's solicitations, the raw emotions and sordid experience of the characters are laid bare.

When 'Finally it was all too much', the light changes, provoking a quieter reflection upon their present condition. M speculates if his women now ever 'meet and sit. Over a cup of that green tea they both so loved, without milk or sugar, not even a squeeze of lemon'. As he dreams of dinghy sailing on a May morn, W2 feels 'They might even feel sorry for me, if they could see me. But never so sorry as I for them', and W1 sighs 'Poor creature. Poor creatures'.

Upon sensing that darkness might offer neither release nor peace – 'the darker the worse' – the characters rage against the disinterested way the 'Hellish half-light' appears to 'just play' with them. They are provoked into a conscious questioning of what change is demanded of them:

W1: Is it that I do not tell the truth, is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then no more light at last, for the truth?

W2: Is it something I should do with my face other than utter? Weep?

M: Looking for something. In my face. Some truth. In my eyes. Not even.

'M' can conclude only that the light is 'mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On and off'. It has 'No mind'.' He is left in ignorance, ever articulating the inescapable, unanswered dilemma of the human condition: 'Am I as much as … being seen?'

Da capo

Mechanically replaying all as before appears to repeat the ordeal without resolution. Nothing changes, including the 'change' which the characters chorus. What happens happens, apparently ad infinitum.

During theatrical rehearsals, however, Beckett reworked his original script, experimenting with the light becoming tired the second time around:

…it would be dramatically more effective to have [the light] express a slight weakening, both of question and response, by means of less and perhaps slower light and correspondingly less volume and speed of voice … The whole idea involves a spot mechanism of greater flexibility than has seemed necessary so far. The inquirer [the light] beginning to emerge as no less a victim of his inquiry than they and as needing to be free, within narrow limits, literally to act the part, ie, to vary if only slightly his speeds and intensities.

The Beckett on Film director, Anthony Minghella, contends that 'The repeat will be a different version of the same words', though it remains arguable that the characters are 'doing things again and again until they think they've got it right and can therefore move on'. Forever replaying the same action conveys a hopelessness of ever comprehending: 'Am I as much as … being seen?' With always a rewind to the opening chorus, Play ends in darkness '…and the darker the worse. Strange.'