A typical plot summary is irrelevant and superfluous for this as well as most other one-act plays by Samuel Beckett. Play, in particular, defies all normal conventions when it comes to the standard question of “what happens?” The inescapable truth is that the answer to that questions “not much.”
The stage is bare except for three identical, over-sized funeral urns in which only the faces of the two female characters and one male character is ever seen. The play quite literally begins with the sound of chaotic noise as all three characters begin speaking their own personal monologues at once. W1, the woman to the right of the man in the middle (her husband) is speaking cryptically about “darkness. W2, the woman to the left of the man is also speaking cryptically about a “shade gone.” The man in the middle, M1, in between hiccups speaks cryptically about peace and the loss of pain. After that short prologue of sorts, each of the characters begins to speak individually, guided not by what the other two say, but speaking only when a spotlight them.
Most of what follows features three distinctly related but not interconnected monologues recounting a singular even in their lives: when the wife discovered that her husband was having an affair with the other woman on the other side of W1. Because the monologues are not really a conversation, but recollected thoughts express as monologue, a backstory about the discovery and subsequent ending of the affair can be gathered, but the exactly timeline is disjointed and out sync. It becomes clear that the wife hired a private detective to confirm her suspicions, but he reported back that he found no evidence because the husband discovered the detective on his trail and bought him off.
It is also determined that the wife threatened to kill herself unless her husband ended the affair. Eventually, the husband confesses and promises to end it, but when the affair has picked up again, the wife realizes it by smelling the other woman on him. The wife confronts the other woman. The husband promises the other woman they will go away together. When the husband has disappeared, the wife goes to the other woman’s place again, but finds it boarded up. So she goes back home burns all his belongings.
After a short blackout, all pretense toward a conventional narrative is dropped. What actually happens after the burning of his things remains ambiguous as the next section of individual monologues lapses into increasingly abstract language in which the events of the past intermingle with a seemingly awareness of present circumstances in the funeral urns. The wife continues to make cryptic remarks about the dark. The other woman falls back into repetitious ponderances about a “shade gone.” The husband circles around the twin idea of peace and pain.
The short final section again creates a cacophony of three voices all speaking at once with the wife repeating a call to “give her up” while the other woman begins a memory of a morning when she was sitting and the husband reiterates that they were not together for very long.
