Come and Go. A “dramaticule.” Written in English, 1965. Dedicated to John Calder. World premiere (in German) at the Schiller-Theatre, Berlin, 14 January 1966; English-language premiere at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, 28 February 1968; American premiere at the Theater for the New City, New York, 23 October 1975. First publication in Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces. Available in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett and The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume III of The Grove Centenary Editions.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much – and then performed so little. This feeling will so completely predominate over every other that they will not even consider it necessary to give it words; but on either side it will be silently assumed, and form the ground-work of all they have to talk about.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Come and Go might be the most colorful of Beckett’s plays. The three women (Flo, Vi and Ru) are dressed in yellow, red and violet coats (however “dull” the stage directions indicate, in most productions they are bright pastels); they are colors that betray the content of the play, an observation about lost youth, mortality and desire. The three women were apparently friends together at a school run by a “Miss Wade”; they sit together now as they sat together then. “Just sit together as we used to, in the playground at Miss Wade’s. … Holding hands … that way. Dreaming of … love.” Their reverie is punctuated as each intimates to the other a dark secret (perhaps the impending death) of each of the three, individually. The play ends as they cross arms and hold hands in a particularly precise manner, a geometry of personal intimacy. “I can feel the rings,” Flo says in the line that closes the play. “Hands made up to be as visible as possible. No rings apparent,” says the stage direction.

The age of the women, too, is “indeterminate”; they may be twenty, they may be eighty. What is clear is that they are no longer children. What lives here among impending mortality is the ability of touch and word to draw memories of past love. That this desire, hope and intimacy can be embodied in an object, like a ring according to Flo, is illusory. It is present not in the empirical world but in the swirl of the past and the desires that inhabit these three bodies, brought to life in this pale companionship. The failure of the present world receives its compensation in the contemplation of the past.

Its depiction must be disciplined in that precise geometry of intimacy that Beckett insists upon in the formal quality of performance. The minimal gestures and quiet dialogue focus the attention upon each subtle movement, upon each syllable. In John Crowley’s 2001 film of the play below, even the movements of the performers into and out of the playing area – the coming and going of the title – are unhindered by obvious footsteps; the performers seem to ease slowly into and out of the space, lacking the body’s bobbing when it is at full gait. (Note especially the extraordinary power of the movement of Flo’s thumb in the penultimate shot, a movement which is only powerful because of the extraordinary restraint of movement in the rest of the production.) The characters inhabit a grace of memory, touch and movement. The grace (present in the silence and darkness which contain both desire and the past, surrounding the three women) renders the intimations of mortality even harder to bear. But it is a grace that lends to the play, and its characters, a beauty, significance and meaning that cut straight to the heart of human experience.

NOTA BETE: The text used in the below production is corrupt, omitting the very first lines of the play:

VI: Ru.
RU: Yes.
VI: Flo.
FLO: Yes.
VI: When did we three last meet? …

This has the effect of undermining the rhythm and intimacy of this short play; it’s as if the first bar or two of a piano trio had been omitted in performance. “This is chamber music. It must be perfect,” Beckett said of Footfalls, and the same is true here.