That Time

Background >

Theme

'That Time is about a man at the end of his life being bombarded by information being given to him by three different versions of his own voice, charting the course of his own life,' says Charles Garrad, director of the Beckett on Film production. 'It's about the relationship between memory and imagination, the crossover when things that one actually remembers are confused with things that may or may not have happened – the nebulous nature of past experience.'

Each inner voice listened to is questioning a fragment of memory of what happened in that time of childhood or that time of middle-age or that time of old age. Neither the Voices nor Listener know 'when was that' time. The Voices reach no conclusion:

A12 was that another time all that another time was there ever any other time but that time

B12 that time in the end

C12 come and gone in no time gone in no time

'The way Beckett describes things seems to be very close to the way that we actually experience things,' concludes Garrard. 'This play is like going on a long train journey and trying to work something out in your head. It's the same set of events repeated and changed, so you're never sure whether it is something

that he remembers, something he would have liked to have happened, or something he feared might have happened. They are all combined and reiterated again and again.'

With the voices fading inconclusively in the final silence, 'little or nothing' remains but the Listener's inconclusive, inexplicable smile.