It was written between 1962 and 1963 and first produced in German as Spiel on 14 June 1963 at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany, directed by Deryk Mendel, with Nancy Illig (W1), Sigfrid Pfeiffer (W2) and Gerhard Winter (M).
[1] The curtain rises on three identical grey funeral "urns",[2] about three feet tall by preference,[3] arranged in a row facing the audience.
At the beginning and end of the play, a spotlight picks out all three faces, and all three characters recite their own lines, in what Beckett terms a "chorus";[3] the effect is unintelligible.
It is one of Beckett's most 'musical' pieces with "a chorus for three voices, orchestration, stage directions concerning tempo, volume and tone, a da capo[11] repeat of the entire action"[2] and a short coda.
From the moment when the man tried to escape his tired marriage and odious professional commitments by taking a mistress, [events took a predictable enough course:] the wife soon began to ‘smell her off him’;[14] there were painful recriminations when the wife accused the man, hired a private detective, threatened to kill herself, and confronted the mistress in an old rambling house reminiscent of Watt (and where the servant again is 'Erskine'[15]) ...
According to Knowlson and John Pilling in Frescoes of the Skull: the later prose and drama of Samuel Beckett, “"[T]he three figures in Play … are not three-dimensional characters.
Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with of [his long-time partner] Suzanne, for the rest of his life.”[19] In short time their association became “a very intimate and personal one.”[20] “In a visit to Paris in January 1961, Barbara ... informed Beckett that she intended to move [there] to live permanently”[21] “a move which had been discussed more than once with Sam.”[22] His response was unusual.
Ostensibly this was to ensure if he died before her Suzanne would “inherit the rights to his work, since, under French law, there was no ‘common-law wife’ legislation … Or he may simply have wanted to affirm where his true loyalty lay.
Whatever the reason, the marriage made it clear … that he was unwilling to leave the woman with whom he had already lived for more than twenty years.”[21] For all that, in June 1961 Bray still decided to move and despite his recent marriage “[a]lmost every day [he went] round, often spending a good part of the day or a large part of the evening there.”[22] “Oddly enough, this side of his life was [not well] known about in Paris ... [Beckett’s] natural reserve and well-developed sense of decorum were allied to his fear of giving offence to Suzanne.”[23] Anthony Cronin notes that strangely – or perhaps not so strangely – during this time he was often to be found talking “fervently and seriously about suicide.”[24] Despite his unwillingness to do much about it he was clearly suffering badly from guilt.
To comply with the law, Beckett “was obliged to be in residence in Folkestone for a minimum of two weeks to allow him to be married in the Registry Office there”[25] and this time spent there observing the locals may well have influenced the “middle class, English, ‘Home Counties’” setting of Play and his use in the play of the names of “Ash and Snodland” which are both the names of towns in Kent,[14] although James Knowlson points to two visits to Sweetwater at about the same time.
“Whitelaw’s deep brooding voice caught so many inflections that Beckett found himself at times listening to her instead of rehearsing the play.”[27] In 1998, David Benedict of The Independent argued that Play is a "finer, more dramatically distilled" work than Waiting for Godot (1953).
[31] They are playing … a pointless game with unending time of which they are the playthings.”[32] 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.”[33] 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.”[13] 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)”[34] 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.”[35] Neither of these analogies conflicts with the more popular views where the spotlight is believed to represent God,[36] 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.
Yet the tragedy ends, bloodlessly, with Titus remaining unwillingly in Rome, while the other two reluctantly leave the city to go their separate ways.
[41] The text certainly indicates that very least the husband might have “sought refuge in death”[42] also “[n]ot only does W1 threaten both her own life and that of W2, but W1 describes herself as ‘Dying for dark,’[43] and W2 affirms, ‘I felt like death.’[16] As so often with Beckett, the loose clichés assume an eerie literality.”[44] 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 [which] pointed him in the direction that made a tightly focused, monologic play like Happy Days or Play possible.
Vico...Joyce" (whose strained, unpleasant second sentence reads, in full, "The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded ham-sandwich"), Beckett makes a striking comparison between Dante's version of Purgatory and Joyce's: “Dante's is conical and consequently implies culmination.
[46] If the trio are separated physically then each would be in a private hell where he or she imagines and reimagines what may have happened to the other two and relives the events of the narration in his or her own mind.
[47] Likewise Beckett’s take on Purgatory is that it “is a state rather than a process.”[48] In 1965 Philip Glass composed music for a production of Play.
“This [interpretation] was much turned over, along with doubts whether it should be there at all, in animated discussions that went on throughout the Barbican meeting places.”[51] 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.
Juliet Stevenson told [ Katharine Worth ] that during rehearsals she had wondered whether the lines were being delivered too fast for viewers to take in their sense [but] theatre critic, Alice Griffin ... thought that the lines ‘came across more clearly and more easily understandable than sometimes in the theatre.’ This she attributed partly to Minghella's use of close-up, a recurring feature of the film versions naturally enough.”[52] 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 however criticized by The Guardian's Art critic Adrian Searle as "adolescent, and worse, clichéd and illustrational," adding: "Any minute, expect a dragon".