W1: "Yes strange darkness best and the darker the worse."
W2: "Yes perhaps a shade gone I suppose some might say."
M: "Yes peace one assumed all out all the pain."
These are the opening lines of dialogue in the play and what is most remarkable about them is that they are all spoke simultaneously, along with the next few successful lines. It is a dialogue in the conventional sense, of course, but it is also not an example of what Robert Altman-esque overlapping conversation. Essentially, the effect is—for many if not most, at least—just noise. Unintelligible, meaningless, confusing; a chaotic atonal symphony of sound. And that is entirely the point. “Play” is a play that at times seems almost ferociously single-minded in its attempt to break down every last remaining convention of drama which Becket’s previous plays had not already deconstructed or demolished.
“I said to him, Give her up. I swore by all I held most sacred—”
The first line spoken by a single individual has already been spoken by the same character in the final grouping of lines spoken collectively at once by all three. For the first time in most cases, the audience actually has a chance to understand what is being said. The stage directions accompanying the dialogue are as important: after a blackout, a spotlight falls on the face of W1 inside the large urn. As each character in turn delivers a line individually, the spotlight moves to the person from the previous speaker.
"At the same time I prefer this to . . . the other thing. Definitely. There are endurable moments."
Although there is never any indication that the three characters are actually aware of the presence of the others or that their dialogue is any sense an actual conversation taking place between or among them, there is the suggestion of conscious awareness of their situation. They are basically talking heads trapped within funeral urns so the logical assumption from the start is that they are speaking from beyond the grave. The observation by “the other woman” in the love triangle that took place during life that present circumstances are preferable is one of the most intense hints about the full dimension of what actually took place between them during life.
“Some fool was cutting grass. A little rush, then another.”
Just before M makes this remark, W2 has directly mentioned the sound of an old-fashioned push-mower as accompanying imagery to a particularly intense memory of an emotional moment in time. M is not responding here to that imagery the way one could in a normal conversation; in fact, his mention of the mower seems to be another example of the use of repetition which the author engages to suggest that the dialogue are all really parts of three different monologues taking place simultaneously. This repetition is particularly unique, however, because Beckett actually commented upon it during rehearsals for a 1978 production in which he linked the staccato rhythm of the mower being pushed through to the intended rhythm of the dialogue: bursts of energy followed by a pause. That rhythmic repetition also serves to reinforce the conceptual idea of hell being endless repetition no matter what was being repeated.
