Interpretations
“The earliest version (April 1962) was written for a woman and two men, Syke and Conk, figures in white boxes. In the final version we are presented instead with, as Michael Robinson describes it in The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett, “the three corners of love’s eternal triangle (the emphasis here is on the eternal) … They have no names, simply the designations M, W1 and W2 which aim at anonymity but also stand for all men and women who have, like them, been caught up in a three-part love affair,”
The play is entitled Play, in the same way that Beckett’s only venture into film is called Film but as always with Beckett there are other levels. “Speaking of his previous life the man remarks: ‘I know now, all that was just … play’, but what then is the meaning of ‘all this? And when will this become the same?’ All three characters admit that life was senseless yet there appears to be ‘no sense in this … either, none whatsoever’; though this does not prevent them from making ‘the same mistakes as when it was the sun that shone, of looking for sense where possibly there is none. They are playing … a pointless game with unending time of which they are the playthings.” This also could be a reference to one of the world’s most famous theatrical metaphors: “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”
In writing to George Devine, who directed the Old Vic production, Beckett suggests that “the inquirer (light) begins to emerge as no less a victim of his inquiry than they and as needing to be free, within narrow limits, literally to act the part, i.e. to vary only slightly his speeds and intensities.” But the role of the light is even more ambiguous, for it has also been seen as “a metaphor for our attention (relentless, all-consuming, whimsical)” and a way of “switching on and switching off speech exactly as a playwright does when he moves from one line of dialogue on his page to the next.” Neither of these analogies conflicts with the more popular views where the spotlight is believed by to represent God, or some other moral agent tasked with assessing, each character's case to be relieved from the binds of the urn by having them relive this relationship, which has ruined all their lives. This view ascribes a motive to the light beyond mere torture. That may not be the case. Just as easily as God, the light could represent the devil.
This reliving of the details surrounding the affair only takes up the first half of the text however; Beckett called this part the ‘Narration.’ As Paul Lawley says in "Beckett’s dramatic counterpoint: a reading of Play", “he second half of the text (preceded by a five second long blackout) – called ‘Meditation’ by Beckett himself – sheds a subtle new light on the first. In the Meditation each of the heads casts about for the sense of its situation, considers the nature of the light, probes for certainties amid the darkness and then makes an attempt to imagine what has happened to the other two corners of this particular Eternal Triangle … We can now see that the heads are not chained exclusively to their ‘past’, their narration(s): they are victims of the light, certainly, but not only victims, for they can recognize themselves as such and can speak of the light when forced to speak by the light. The light obliges them to speak but it does not necessarily determine what they speak – yet we only realize this in the Meditation section of the text.”
“They cope with the light in various ways and natures. W1 screams at the light: ‘Get off me’ and she wonders what she must do to satisfy the disturbing and tormenting light. W2 is content with the idea that the light must know that she is doing her best. But she also wonders if she is perhaps a little ‘unhinged’ (meaning that she may go mad). For M the light enables fantasy. He imagines the two women drinking green tea together in the places they have each been with him and comforting each other. He fantasises waking up with both women and then going for a boat trip with the two of them on a summer’s afternoon. “At the end of the second part, M is completely aware of the mechanism of the light but not aware of his own narcissism” however.
“If the play consisted only of the Narration it would be as though the light were obliging them not only to speak, but to speak only of these events, to tell only this story.”
Many of Beckett’s plays and prose pieces are located “in ‘places’ which may strike us as being most adequately described as ‘Hell’, ‘Limbo’ or ‘Purgatory’– and the parallels with Dante are always tempting” – and indeed the most popular interpretation of Play is that the three are in some place like this. The use of urns to encase the bodies of the three players is thought to symbolise their entrapment inside the demons of their past; the way in which all three urns are described at the start of the play as "touching" each other is often deciphered as symbolising the shared problem which all three characters have endured.
“The whole situation resembles very closely that of Bérénice, in which two men, the Emperor Titus and King Antiochus, are in love with the heroine; Bérénice, for her part, is in love with Titus and regards Antiochus as her dearest friend. Yet the tragedy ends, bloodlessly, with Titus remaining unwillingly in Rome, while the other two reluctantly leave the city to go their separate ways. By the end of Bérénice, all three major characters have threatened to commit suicide; perhaps the three characters in Play are being punished because they have committed suicide. The text certainly indicates that very least the husband might have “sought refuge in death” also “ot only does W1 threaten both her own life and that of W2, but W1 describes herself as ‘Dying for dark,’ and W2 affirms, ‘I felt like death.’ As so often with Beckett, the loose clichés assume an eerie literality.”
Beckett tasked himself with re-reading all of Racine’s plays in the mid-1950s and James Knowlson suggests that “this daily diet of Racinian claustrophobia forced Beckett to concentrate on the true essentials of theatre: Time, Space and Speech pointed him in the direction that made a tightly focused, monologic play like Happy Days or Play possible.
It is conceivable that the three parties are not actually dead at all. Purgatory is, after all, not a theological concept Beckett would have been brought up with though Dante’s interpretation of it did catch his imagination. In the final paragraph of Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce, Beckett makes a striking comparison between Dante’s version of Purgatory and Joyce’s: “Dante's is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr. Joyce's is spherical and excludes culmination … On this earth that is Purgatory." If the trio are separated physically then each one of them will be going through their own private hell imagining what has happened to the others and reliving the events in their own head over and over again. If we view the three urns purely as a theatrical device to bring these separate points of view together this interpretation is also valid. “Life on earth, the endless recurring cycle of history, constitutes Purgatory for Joyce in Finnegans Wake. From Joyce’s Purgatory there is no escape, not even for the individual human being, who dies only to be reborn into the cycle. Likewise Beckett’s take on Purgatory is that it “is a state rather than a process.”
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