Bom claims that he couldn't at which point Bam accuses him of lying saying that he had been given the information and he would also be subjected to the same grilling until he confessed.
The Voice of Bam tells us that time has passed but no effort is made to visually convey this fact; it is simply stated.
The voice no longer needs to hear the complete interchange and jumps to Bam accusing Bim of lying and threatening him with "the works".
James Knowlson in his biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, suggests that the names may echo Richard Aldington's Enter Bim and Bom, the epilogue to his 1931 novel The Colonel's Daughter, on an English football field to comment upon the degeneration of English society and "became for Beckett emblems of human cruelty, disguised under a comic garb.
"[12] They first appear in the short story Yellow, then in Murphy (along with Bum), in draft passages deleted from Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Bom and Bem pop up in How It Is before finally bowing out in What Where.
"Beckett adored Franz Schubert's song cycle, Winterreise (Winter Journey) … [and ] used to listen spellbound to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's stunning recording of the songs … He also knew about his connections with the town of Graz [Schubert had stayed there for a time] … In the Schubert Lieder, the traveller in the opening poem, Gute Nacht (Good Night) has lost his love and journeys disconsolately from May into snowy winter … [This] provided Beckett with the formal structure of his play, moving from spring to winter … suggesting death.
"[13] In his notes for the German TV production, Beckett wrote "'For PA [i.e. playing area] the light of other days'.
[14] And he admitted that he expressly associated this play with Thomas Moore's poignant poem, Oft, in the Stilly Night,[15] which includes the lines 'Sad memory brings the light / Of other days around me'.
A political reading cannot be simply dismissed though since Beckett himself "briefly entertained making each character wear a tarboosh, fezlike headgear associated with Armenians.
Beckett undoubtedly had something quite specific in mind as can be seen in the way he moulded his vision over the three productions in America, Germany and France detailed below.
Beckett's characters (e.g. May in Footfalls, Mouth in Not I) seem doomed to repeat themselves, as much as the accidents or miracles of analogy allow them some momentary insight into their situations.
James Knowlson believes "that crime appears likely to be Calderón's 'original sin of being born', which Beckett had evoked at the beginning of his career in this essay Proust.
He wrote to Kay Boyle in March 1983: "Just finished a short piece – theatre – for the Graz autumn festival, to my dissatisfaction.
"The first production of the play at the Harold Clurman Theatre, New York on 15 June 1983 directed by Alan Schneider, was (naturally) totally faithful to Beckett’s text.
"[27] "[It] arrived at the last minute when the first two plays were already in rehearsal [having] been hastily translated by the author to finish off Alan Schneider's evening.
"[31] "Instead of players in long gray gowns, their own corporeality suspect, the four figures of the revised, television What Where now appeared as floating faces dissolving in and out [of the light] … Neither representation of Bam then is corporeal, Beckett representing instead a spectre and its mirror reflection, and the rest of the figures of What Where are ghosts as well, all the more so as they are represented by the patterns of dots on the television screen.
[33] "The clear indication is that what we are seeing is both a memory and a scenario: instructions come from the megaphone, the Voice of Bam controls what we see, puts the characters through their movements rapidly without words like a film running over its spools at rewind speed, and then starts again, occasionally stopping when Bam is not satisfied and a phrase is improved to add to the force of the theme.
[The play can therefore be compared with Krapp’s Last Tape but it also] shares many similarities with Ohio Impromptu, the identical characters in appearance and dress, the unwinding backwards of events and the stylization of image and movement in particular.
"[17] "The [German] television play showed three characters who simply appear and disappear instead of shuffling back and forth on stage, which took a long time.
Considering the original printed text not successful, following the clearly superior television piece, Beckett sought with [the director Pierre] Chabert to find a stage equivalent.
"Because of technical difficulties, the French stage production replaced the enlarged and distorted reflection of Bam’s face with a halo, a ring of diffuse orange light.
Chabert’s production note is as follows: ‘rond lumineux = source de Voix,’"[36] Additionally, "[i]n place of the cowl-covered heads that created the impression of floating faces, Beckett substituted shaved skulls.
The field of memory was now implicit ... On the stage the players appeared unrealistically high standing on a concealed two-foot platform, their heads aligned with the pulsing light that echoed the TV tube.
"[17] In 1987 Beckett worked with Stan Gontarski and John Reilly to refine the production, filmed at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, for American television.
Beckett had been not quite satisfied with the French stage production and re-introduced the "cowl-covered heads replacing the skulls [and also asked that] the light somehow [take] on the image of Bam (but not, he emphasised, televised).
As with the German television production the Voice of Bam was now represented as an eerily distorted face, hovering in the upper left corner of a dark screen.
Bam, Bom, Bim, and Bem appear as detached faces along the bottom of the screen, floating in the black void and illuminated in stark white contrast.
O'Donnell sets the play within a claustrophobic, high-tech library, its tall shelves bordered by strips of fluorescent lighting.
The voice itself is dispassionate and calm; issuing from a megaphone-shaped loudspeaker fixed above the central doors, it evokes HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The play has been adapted as a one-act chamber opera by Heinz Holliger, composed in 1988 and first released on a commercial recording in 1997.