Imagination dead imagine. A place, that again. Never another question. A place, then someone in it, that again. Crawl out of the frowsy deathbed and drag it to a place to die in. Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again.

“All Strange Away” (1963-64)

The structure of Play, before Beckett’s participation as director, was of a play in two halves, each exactly like the other: at the close of the first rendition, the play was to be repeated “exactly.” After beginning work on the Paris production, however, and as a result of his experience in the theatre itself, Beckett changed his mind. He wrote to George Devine, director of the London premiere, on 9 March 1964:

The last rehearsals with Serreau have led us to a view of the da capo which I think you should know about. According to the text it is rigorously identical with the first statement. We now think it would be dramatically more effective to have it express a slight weakening, both of question and of response, by means of less and perhaps slower light and correspondingly less volume and speed of voice.

It should be noted that the insistence of the light itself does not change, nor the rigorous technical movement of the single inquisitorial spotlight. Gontarski writes:

The Evergreen edition, moreover, is the first printing in which the opening instructions on lighting were emended by deleting “not quite” from the original Faber version, “The response to light is not quite immediate.” … Such a revision may at first seem minor, little more than a technical adjustment, instructions to the lighting designer. But in the delicate balance of verbal and visual images which constitutes Beckettian theatre, such changes are fundamental, thematically potent, especially since light often functions as a character in Beckett’s theatre; this is the case with Play in particular. If a delay exists between light’s command and the response, then a certain amount of deliberation is possible among the subjects; the situation of the urn-encrusted characters is humanized. In Beckett’s revision, the final vestiges of humanity (and humanism) are drained from an inquisitorial process that Beckett ironically calls Play.

The inquest is purgatorial rather than hellish (if we can even continue to conceive experience in that tripartite hell/purgatory/heaven triad), and Beckett’s revision to the da capo suggests a growing exhaustion of both inquisitor and accused: that there will be an end, that at some point, as the man fervently hopes, all this might indeed be “just play,” at the point at which light will be extinguished and the voices silent. But the revisions beg easy interpretation. Xeno’s paradoxes (with which Beckett was undoubtedly familiar) deny a final closure, a final rest; the inquisitor is as much tortured as the subjects, and will be so throughout. Compassion lies, however, in the repetition: time both tortures in its inescapability and has compassion in its passing. The past remains ineradicable, its desire, love and violence bodied in the tortured souls here. But time transforms (cf. Proust). Both the essentials of light and duration as theatrical elements are thrust to center stage, so to speak.

Beckett needed a theatre; the tools of performance contributed to the “final” texts we have; without his presence in the rehearsal hall Play would be a different text. Theatrical and dramatic work can only begin at the writer’s desk; for the dramatist it cannot end there. Maurice Blanchot said that, “A work is finished, not when it is completed, but when he who labors at it from within can just as well finish it from without.” For Beckett, that “without” was the stage, not the desk. Gontarski concludes:

What the revised and corrected texts represent, finally, is Beckett’s physical work in the theatre, a period of self-collaboration and so self-revision which all but dominated the final two decades of his life. They emphasize that his direct work with actors and technicians, while not always tranquil, was always productive and of no less importance, of no less value than the work he did in the seclusion of his study to produce and translate the first versions of his play scripts. Beckett’s theatrical texts, however, were created not in his study but in the theatre, and as such they stand as testimony to Beckett’s creative vitality into the eighth decade of his life and to his faith in the living theatre as a vital, creative force in the waning days of the twentieth century.