Stuck on Repeat: Samuel Beckett’s Play (1962–3)

Being, presence, self. These are concepts which seem simple (and self evident) enough, yet can often elude our grasp when we try to put them to the point.

Samuel Beckett’s Play, written between the period of 1962–3 is a one-act theatrical piece exploring the overlaps and interstices of intersubjectivity, language and (moral) being by way of a dizzying verbal barrage that spews forth almost inconceivably through the mouths of its three (nameless) characters. These figures — on page designated only as W1, M and W2 in order of their stage position left-to-right — are fixed in urns (each of their necks “held fast in the urn’s mouth”) and speak, for the most part, in singularity (alternately, without intonation and in jagged piecemeal tempo) regarding a series of encounters and observations pertaining to the dissolution of marriage between W1 and M due to an adulterous affair between the latter and W2.

The voices stop and start abruptly according to the machinations (whims?) of a spotlight which alternates its focus intermittently between each of the three figures, leaving the other two in darkness, often shifting with such rapidity that sentences are cut off midway until the light refocuses on their speaker. Following this recounting, each figure reflects on their present existence, expressing a sense of anxiety regarding their existential situation beyond what we might assume is a material death and the ambiguity of their current state of confessional unrest. Finally, after the faces conclude their broken reflections the stage direction calls (unbeknownst to the audience) for the play, in its entirety, to be repeated.

Immediate to the attention of the viewer of a performance of Play must be the contrast between the interiority of the figures who, while relating a series of shared events, seem to be unaware of the presence (and to the audience, proximity) of their companions. In such a way Play offers its witness a series of broken fragments of parallel narration, not so much woven as torn apart and thrown back together, sequencing each individual viewpoint along the contours of an inexplicable (and seemingly predetermined) point of emotional tension.

As in much of Beckett’s work, Play focuses on the interaction between words and their meaning (or, just as often, their lack of meaning). Through the mouths of the three talking heads the audience experiences the pieces of dialogue as a collage of utterances almost as if they’re speaking themselves in a seemingly preconscious barrage. All sense of character development or personal depth is surplus to the unfolding of the dramatic situation; there is no physicality to the staging of Play and we’re asked to consider the characters as figures who lack agency, and exist as mere vessels for the (non-)act of language.

Further contrast is achieved through the juxtaposition of the past tense recollections of the affair with the latter part of the dialogue in which the figures reflect on their current state of being (and that of the other two points on the triangle). They express too, a contrarian anxiety surrounding their existence, as if in retelling they may reach some manner of moral resolution and purge themselves of past deeds or free themselves from their in-between ‘undead’ state:

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?

And yet, simultaneously, the speakers are seemingly incapable of achieving their own oblivion and at times actively resist such resolution, instead demanding that the light continue to acknowledge them:

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

Here, being—the very existence of the characters—seems married to the act of an eternal retelling, as if the painful memories the faces relate to the (assumed interlocutor &) audience have not only outlived the physical bodies of the characters themselves but have also achieved a kind of extra-temporal status in which the pain and misery of these ‘playings’ is doomed to repeat indefinitely. The edges of the text, due to its de capo structure, point towards an indefinite repetition, denying any sense of narrative resolution: each character expresses a longing to be free of the autopoetic retelling that appears to be their fate and struggle with a(n assumed?) agency placed in the antagonistic role of interrogator who also doubles as a stand in for the audience. The jumbled syntax—the way each character seems to talk over the top of the others without being aware of their presence—further creates a sense of isolation and claustrophobia, of being trapped, not only spatially, the characters in their urns, unaware of their counterparts, but temporally and even existentially.

M: Mere eye. No mind. Opening and shutting on me. Am I as much ­­
[Spot off. Blackout. Three seconds. Spot on M.]
M: Am I much as . . . being seen?

Play relies much on connotation: its dramatic scene is reminiscent of an inquisition or interrogation, alongside which associations of a purgatorial half-state flourish without ever being explicitly stated by the scene or its characters. The true undeath in Play is revealed through the repetition, in which the recollections, initially told in what seems to be a panicked, haphazard (albeit often comical) manner (and in a way which viewers would struggle to comprehend) are retold with as little possible differentiation, leaving the audience feeling as if there is no conceivable possibility for differentiation, everything the voices reveal was and is fated to play out exactly as it must. This seems to raise various questions surrounding the temporality and materiality of representation and, possibly, in the same broad stroke, of consciousness itself: the way the represented appear to exist in some respects beyond those who might seek to comprehend, the body’s self-incriminating eruptions *hiccup* (pardon), the cyclic and amoral nature of desire.

W2: No doubt I make the same mistake as when it was the sun that shone, of looking for sense where possibly there is none.

The title, ‘play’ is undoubtedly as much a nod to the term used to set a recording in motion as it is an invocation of metatheatricality (as a kind of game of ideas in which the author and actors play out a series of meanings with their audience). To this end Play calls to focus the contrast between theatre and film, the seeming artificiality of a recording and its malleability to the human artificer without denigrating or championing one or the other in any moral or evaluative sense. To extrapolate here, the intention of Play might also point towards this kind of epistemological uncertainty in relation to all acts of representation (art, speech, etc.) and even to the act of perception itself.

While much more could be said about the possible intentions of its author (many point to Beckett’s strained relationship with his mother or the relationship between Beckett, his long time partner Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil and Barbara Bray who were embroiled in something of an open relationship) the master stroke of Play might just be that it seems to seduce us into flirting with alternate readings, tempting us to find solace in one or another, to make sense out of an awful situation, seeking consolation in one form of moral resolution or another, all the while pulling us back into the ambiguity of being unable to grasp the situation in its whole and the impossibility of being able to commit to one frame of reference at the expense of all others.

You can find some great productions of Play on YouTube and many theatre companies recreate the eternal scene to this day.