Play

Background

From each ghastly urn on stage, a head protrudes. Being so confined, action is impossible. Nameless, the impassive faces of an apparently upper-class man and two women can but narrate their parts in a bitter and sordid eternal triangle, each oblivious of the others' presence. Without any attempt at communication, their toneless monologues are delivered at a 'rapid tempo throughout'. They appear every bit as trapped in and pained by their personal self-deceits as they are physically embalmed within their urns.



The seemingly once affluent wife recalls her bourgeois enthralment with green tea, the Riviera 'or our darling Grand Canary'. She visualises herself in melodramatic situations: 'judge then of my astonishment when one fine morning, as I was sitting stricken in the morning room, he slunk in, fell on his knees before me, buried his face in my lap and…confessed'. She complacently compliments herself too but, as the 'wronged woman', cannot hide her jealousy and contempt. She spits venomous insults at her rival: 'pudding face, puffy, spots, blubber mouth, jowls, no neck, dugs you could– Calves like a flunkey–'. Lacking emotional control, she rails against what she imagines is the light's demand for repentance: '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?'




With a superior air, 'the other woman' snipes: 'I understood why he preferred me … her photographs were kind to her,' and caustically and pompously 'fearing she was about to offer me violence, I rang for Erskine and had her shown out.' Her wild laughter betrays an anxious desire for release from her present predicament, hoping that the light 'might get angry and blaze me clean out of my wits'.




The bigamous husband has been a man of some professional means. His is a thoroughly inflated ego but his past behaviour has proved dangerously deceptive and cowardly. He still dismisses his ruthless treatment of women as mere play-things: 'all that was just … play'. Though he fantasises about reconciling himself with the women, his periodic hiccups now comically undermine any impression of his former sexual voracity. Now he fears that the light may be 'looking for something. In my face. Some truth. In my eyes. Not even', concluding that the light can only be simply 'mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On and off… Mere eye. No mind', leaving him with the unanswerable conundrum of human existence: 'Am I as much as … being seen?'

The spotlight/camera
An aggressive spotlight – its function, controversially perhaps, substituted by the camera in the film production – performs as a virtual protagonist, mercilessly interrogating the pathetic trio. This on-off light/camera, in randomly juxtaposing speeches, effectively exposes the pretentiousness, contradictions, deceits and evasions. As 'mere eye, no mind' and constantly shifting, however, it appears to have no interest in uncovering meaning.

In her interview for the Beckett on Film project, Juliet Stevenson (who plays W2) confronts the absence of meaning:

'For the first time in my life, I am being asked to play somebody who doesn't exist, who has long, long since ceased to have any feelings or any relationship to any life, or to the story of her own life that she is telling. Anthony [the Director] is getting us to recite it literally with no colouring, no relationship to the content whatsoever. These people tell their stories in this purgatorial situation – have told their stories five billion times already – and you're watching the five-billion-and-first time. So about four billion times before, they stopped having any relationship to it, or caring. That's what's so difficult, because it runs counter to everything that actors are used to doing, which is to invest meaning into dialogue.'

[See 'Links' for full interview.]