Beneath all the stage artifice associated with mounting a production of Samuel Beckett’s Play lies one very valid interpretation which is quite easily understood. Play is akin to the punishment of Sisyphus without the positive existential spin placed upon it by Albert Camus. While other interpretations may be equally valid, a reading of the text as pure nihilist philosophy is absolutely viable. Life has no meaning other than being a playground to enjoy before death and don’t think for a moment that it somehow gets meaning what that finally comes.
The characters are not really characters—they are faces in a burial urn. That is, they are symbolic memories of the dead. They speak, but not in conversation and not with emotion. The words are not existing in some kind of afterlife, they are just echoes; they are just vibrations in the air too soft to be heard by the living and destined to be broken up into parts that would not make sense if they could be heard.
The story that constitutes what passes for a narrative is a love triangle. But not one that is tragic. Not one that is comical. Not one that stands out as special in any particular way. In fact, even the participants seem at times not especially engaged. So mundane and ordinary is the story at the play’s center that the audience never discovers the exact details of what finally occurred and, what’s more, this essential lapse in dramatic expectation is not even all that noticeable. What happened in life between three is presented as being of great emotional meaning to them at the time, but of absolute no real lasting significance. The details vibrate though time as a jumble of recollected thoughts that become meaningless echoes to the only living people who can hear them: those in the audience. The audience has been made privy to a special event not extended to anyone else in the rest of the world and yet by the time the performance ends, it can be almost assured that most of them will care as little for the love triangle as those not made privy to the echoes from the past.
The lives of M, W1, and W2 are quite literally without meaning to anyone—especially not to them because they are dead. And just to make sure this point of the nihilistic meaningless of life is not missed, the entire experience—like Sisyphus once the rock has rolled back down the hill—begins all over again and is repeated without alteration. And so it will be for eternity because while there may not be an afterlife, there is a hell. And that hell is being forced to watch the meaningless existence of other people played out repetitively and infinitely. The old saying is wrong. War isn’t hell. Play is hell.
