The play starts with three similar figures of "indeterminable"[3] age, Flo, Vi, and Ru, sitting quietly on a narrow bench-like seat surrounded by darkness.

The same scenario is then enacted twice more "[w]ith choreography suggestive of the sleight-of-hand artist (button under the thimble)"[7] and with very similar dialogue until Vi finds herself back in the middle of the group; Ru and Flo's positions have however been reversed.

The most sensational whispered information is unheard by the audience and thus creates more mystery and a sense of ongoing interconnection between the trio which includes sharing "secrets."

At the play's conclusion, the three link hands "in the old way"[9] (reminiscent of Winnie's "old style"[10]) forming an unbroken Celtic knot.

The one prop (the bench, described with great precision in Beckett's notes accompanying the play) is lit so as to minimize its visibility.

It is divided into three exactly equal segments of seven lines during which a character exits and comes back in after completing their circuit, taking a different seat to the one they sat on originally.

"The ritual gesture of clasped hands allows them to keep their secrets from each other, but the feeling of the rings evokes the cycle of time.

"[16] "Superficially they make us think of the Three Graces as they link hands, but, more precisely, they resemble in appearance the three mothers in Fritz Lang's M, a film much loved by Beckett.

"[17] Whereas at the start of the play there is a reluctance to talk of the past, after each of the shocking revelations the three women willingly drift off into nostalgia[18] as a means of coping with the present.

The rings that Flo says she feels "may be imagined a symbol of the frustrated hopes of youth, of marriages that never occurred [or failed] or equally their eternal union"[19] that has kept them together throughout their personal tragedies.

During the course of the scene the latter two rise and temporarily leave their seats, but Mrs Williams's actions are confined to striking the floor with her stick.

"[24] "However, more than death, it is ‘the peevishness of decay’[25] that pervades the scene, illustrated by the petty bickering and punctuated by the repeated silences that threaten to stop what action there is.

"[26] "The play fragment also points forward … to the elegant, old-fashioned language and formalised syntax of the three women in Come and Go.

"[27] Flo, Vi, and Ru began their life as Viola, Rose and Poppy in a typescript now held at Reading University Library headed ‘Scene 1’.

The finished work "Come and Go" is extraordinary in its seeming simplicity built upon a rigorous and meticulous structure which has remarkable musical aspects in its formal discipline and clarity.

The final structure of 'come and Go" could easily be the precise basis for a well-balanced and rigorously formal musical composition.

In subsequent drafts Beckett adds a title, Type of Confidence, which he changes to Good Heavens; the names also vanish to be replaced by the letters A, B and C. "Beckett began the play clearly with the structure of three confidential gossips clearly in mind … before going on to draft the play in full … Good Heavens is almost complete, apart from the final conversation between C and A.

In both texts the conversation centres on two secrets: first how each woman manages to achieve her apparently flawless complexion and secondly the fact that the absent member of the trio is suffering from a terminal illness … The difference between what is said face to face and what is said behind the back of the missing person reveals both a devastating feminine hypocrisy and the irony that the secret is told by someone whom the hearer already knows (or soon discovers) to be doomed also.

In a later draft Beckett introduces "three sorrowing husbands – all conspicuously absent from the marital home:[29] The fact that the whispered secret in Come and Go relates to life expectancy is made "more explicit [in Good Heavens], even spelling out the terminal date of the third friend's incurable ailment (‘Three months.