Play (play)
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/* ''Beckett on Film'' (2000) */
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Play is a play by Samuel Beckett. It was written between 1962 and 1963 and first produced in German as Spiel on June 14, 1963 at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany. The first performance in English was in 1964 at the Old Vic in London.
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Synopsis
The curtain rises on two women and a man (referred to only as W1, W2 and M), in a row along the front of the stage with their heads sticking out of the tops of large urns, the rest of their bodies unexposed. They remain like this for the play's duration. At the commencement and the conclusion of the play, all three characters speak, in what Beckett terms a "chorus", but in the main the play is made up of short, sometimes broken sentences spoken by one character at a time. Over the course of the play, it becomes apparent that the man has betrayed Woman #1, or W1, by having an affair with Woman #2. The three characters speak of the affair from their respective points of view on the matter, in an almost contrapuntal manner.
A spotlight is shone on whoever is speaking, leaving the other two characters in darkness. Beckett writes that this spotlight "provokes" the character's speech, and insists that whenever possible, a single, swivelling light should be used, rather than three lights switching on and off. In this manner the spotlight acts like an invisible interrogator.
Near the end of the script, there is the terse instruction: "Repeat play." Beckett elaborates on this in notes, by saying that the repeat might be varied, by changing the intensity of the light, giving a breathless quality to the lines, or even shuffling some of the lines around. At the end of this second repeat, the play appears to start again for a third time, but does not get more than a few seconds into it before it suddenly stops.
Interpretations
One interpretation of the play is that the three characters are actually in purgatory, where they are confession their sins - indeed, one of the characters exclaims "I confess" at one point when recalling their illicit relationship. 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 spotlight, which illuminates only the face of those characters who it wishes to speak, is believed to represent God, or a Higher Power of some sort, who is weighing up each character's case to be relieved from the binds of the urn, and having to relive this relationship which has ruined all their lives.
Music
In 1965 Philip Glass composed music for a production of Play. The piece was scored for two soprano saxophones, and is his first work in a minimalist idiom - an idiom which was substantially influenced by the work of Beckett.
Film versions
Comédie (1966)
In 1966 Beckett worked with a young director, Marin Karmitz (an assistant to Jean Luc Godard as well as Roberto Rosselini), on a film version of Play, resulting in the film Comédie. The cast included Michael Lonsdale, Eléonore Hirt and Delphine Seyrig.
Beckett on Film (2000)
Image:Play.jpg Another filmed version of Play was directed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film project, starring Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliet Stevenson. In this filmed version, the action takes place in a field of "urn people", all speaking at once. The characters' faces are made up to match the urns in which they are placed. For this particular interpretation of the play, it is assumed that the action takes place in Hell (perhaps in reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's famous assertion, "l'enfer, c'est les autres"). A camera is used instead of a stage light to provoke the characters into action; Minghella uses a jump-cut editing technique to make it seem as though there are even more than two repetitions of the text. The postmodern outlook of the film ("a field of urns in a dismal swamp, a gnarled, blasted oak in the background, a lowering, Chernobyl sky") was critized by The Guardian's Art critic Adrian Searle as "adolescent, and worse, cliched and illustrational," adding: "Any minute, expect a dragon".
