The curtain rises on three identical grey funeral "urns",[2] about three feet tall by preference,[3] arranged in a row facing the audience. They contain three stock characters. In the middle urn is a man (M). To his right is his wife (W1) or long-time partner. The third urn holds his mistress (W2). Their "[f]aces [are] so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of the urns."[4] Beckett had used similar imagery before, Mahood's jar in The Unnameable, for example, or the dustbins occupied by Nell and Nagg in Endgame.
At the beginning and end of the play, a spotlight picks out all three faces, and all three characters recite their own lines, in what Beckett terms a "chorus";[3] the effect is unintelligible. The main part of this play is made up of short, occasionally fragmented sentences spoken in a "[r]apid tempo throughout"[4] "which in his 1978 rehearsals [he] likened to a lawn mower – a burst of energy followed by a pause, a renewed burst followed by another pause."[5] "He wrote each part separately, then interspersed them, working over the proper breaks in the speeches for a long time before he was satisfied."[6]
One character speaks at a time and only when a strong spotlight shines in his or her face. The style is reminiscent of Mouth's logorrhoea in Not I, the obvious difference being that these characters constantly use first person pronouns. Clichés and puns abound. While one is talking the other two are silent and in darkness. They neither acknowledge the existence of the others around them (M: "To think we were never together"[7]) nor appear aware of anything outside their own being and past (W2: "At the same time I prefer this to . . . the other thing. Definitely. There are endurable moments"[8]). Beckett writes that this spotlight "provokes" the character's speech, and insists that whenever possible, a single, swivelling light should be used, rather than separate lights switching on and off. In this manner the spotlight is "expressive of a unique inquisitor".[9] Billie Whitelaw referred to it as "an instrument of torture."[10] The spotlight is in effect the play's fourth character.
In an almost fugal style the three obsess over the affair. Each presents his or her own version of the truth told in the past tense and each from his or her respective points of view. It is one of Beckett's most 'musical' pieces with "a chorus for three voices, orchestration, stage directions concerning tempo, volume and tone, a da capo[11] repeat of the entire action"[2] and a short coda.
Towards the end of the script, there is the concise instruction: "Repeat play."[12] Beckett elaborates on this in the notes, by saying that the repeat might be varied. "[I]n the London production, variations were introduced: a weakening of light and voices in the first repeat, and more so in the second; an abridged second opening; increasing breathlessness; changes in the order of the opening words."[5] The purpose of this is to suggest a gradual winding down of the action for he writes of "the impression of falling off which this would give, with the suggestion of a conceivable dark and silence in the end, or of an indefinite approximating towards it."[13] At the end of this second repeat, the play appears as if it is about to start again for a third time (as in Act Without Words II), but does not get more than a few seconds into it before it suddenly stops.
The affair
"The affair was unexceptional. From the moment when the man tried to escape his tired marriage and odious professional commitments by taking a mistress, [events took a predictable enough course:] the wife soon began to ‘smell her off him’;[14] there were painful recriminations when the wife accused the man, hired a private detective, threatened to kill herself, and confronted the mistress in an old rambling house reminiscent of Watt (and where the servant again is 'Erskine'[15]) ... The man renounced the mistress, was forgiven by his wife who 'suggested a little jaunt to celebrate, to the Riviera or ... Grand Canary,'[16] and then, [true to form], returned to the mistress, this time to elope with her. [In time] their relationship too became jaded, and the man"[17] abandons her as well.
According to Knowlson and John Pilling in Frescoes of the Skull: the later prose and drama of Samuel Beckett, “"[T]he three figures in Play … are not three-dimensional characters. Any attempt to analyse them as if they were would be absurd. The stereotype predominates … [They] belong … to the artificial world of melodrama and romance embodied in romanticized fiction."[18]
