Play (play)

Play is a play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in 1962 to 1963 and first produced in German as Spiel on June 14, 1963 at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau[?] in Germany. The first performance in English was in 1964 at the Old Vic in London.

The curtain rises to three people, two women and a man, 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. There are a few short moments when all three speak at once, 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 one of the women by having an affair with the other.

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 that a single, swivelling light should be used, rather than three lights switching on and off.

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.

Play is a relatively short play, with a typical performance lasting around twenty-five minutes.