The Elemental Space of Passion: The Topos of Purgatory in Beckett’s Play

Abstract

With Play,¹ Beckett dared to write a drama whose language does violent things. In a play where there are no longer any recognizable subjects, speech, repetition, and musical structure depict the elemental passion of the masked figures, forming the discursive frame, or space, of the grotesquely visible. Saint Augustine’s famous motto, first used in Waiting for Godot: “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned,” is the dialectic upon which Play is built. It generates the symmetry of despair and hope that preserves the trio’s misshapen passion. After all that the subjects in Play suffer as a result of m’s “affair” and his troubled marriage, the threesome find themselves still confronted with perils not less but far more formidable than those through which they have so narrowly made their way. Prior to their present purgatory, the subjects now emerge from a scene of ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened their imaginations.