Hell Is Repetition
The dialogue is circular and repetitive; almost more of an unending Mobius strip telling a very short story than anything approaching an actual play. The narrative center is the beginning and end of an adulterous affair except that it is not just the center, but everything. Very little of the big picture about the affair is offered, but that’s a gold mine compare to the lack of contextual information about anything else that ever happened to the three characters. One thing is clear enough, however: this period of their existences seemed to produce misery more than anything else. So it stands to reason that hell for them would be the repetition of misery.
The Past Is a Mere Echo in the Present
It is somewhat misleading to actually term the speakers of the lines Beckett has written as “characters.” They are not characters in any tradition dramaturgical sense. Physically, they exist only as heads trapped inside large identical urns. The lines they do speak are not conversation; it is as if three separate monologues about providing three separate individual perspectives on the same collective event are taking place simultaneously. The shift in speaking from one character to the next is not dependent upon contextual relationship between what is speaking spoken, but is initiated far more artificially through the shifting position of a spotlight. Ultimately, the effect suggest the audience greet M, W1 and W2 not as the embodiment of the characters they describe from the past, but rather as spiritual echoes vibrating through time and space into the present.
This Is Not a Love Story
As with every other stage drama written by Beckett, the controlling thematic element is not related to the story of the narrative at all, but rather the telling of it. The bizarre love triangle that unfolds through the lines spoken by the heads in the urns is almost superfluous. Certainly, there is nothing unique or particularly gripping about it as drama. Beckett is a playwright who at times seems to be a one-man mission to destroy everything that audiences have learned to think goes into the creation of a play. Aside from the obvious limitations upon movement imposed upon the actors and interaction imposed upon the characters, just about every single convention of storytelling is ignored. Character development, tension, action rising to a climax, heroes and villains, plot twists and even the most rudimentary of ambiguous explanations for how things went down and turned out are completely ignored. For a play called Play there is very little what one comes to expect from a play in Play.
