Play

'Play' is one of Beckett's most delightful confections, a farce, a vision of hell, a discordant fugue, a logorrheic din: as much a parody of Sartre's 'Huis Clos' as Sunday supplement suburban entanglements.

Three heads - a man, wife, and mistress - look out from urns, and relate the story of the man's affair and the wife's reaction to it, in a rhythmic, overlapping gabble, repeated twice to convey the idea of eternity. These lives, brought to crisis point by a very physical interruption - adultery -are condemned to a disembodied, inhuman, mechanical repetition of a previous existence.

Here, Beckett's interest in memory is at its most alienated - recalling the past is not an act of retrieval, an attempt to piece fragments of a shattered identity as in, for example 'Krapp's Last Tape'. It is a punishment, devoid of poetry, oppressively banal. Worse, the reminiscences are prompted by an unseen lighting man, like a Gestapo interrogator, switching speedily between characters, creating the play's rhythm, forcing them into 'life'. Much as they might like to, they cannot hide, they are at this man's mercy.

You can imagine the effect in the theatre: not only is the mundanity of everyday life shown to be mechanical, barren, dead, with the urns and the repetition not a metaphor for hell or limbo, but for life; but the way these insignificant lives are interrogated, as by the Gestapo, or God, or their own conscience, or paralysed desires, or us, or SOMEBODY, forces us to admit that we don't live very well.

Minghella, unlike his 'Beckett on film' collaborators, eschews over-fidelity. He keeps Beckett's words, but is radically unfaithful (a compliment!) to the play, liberated from theatrical constraints. His bombardment of montage; his intrusive use of colour, sound, camera angles; his turning Beckett's lighting man into the camera, with its clicks and whirrs and zooms; all fundamentally destroy Beckett's theatrical space.

A condition where hell mirrors suburban life, where immobility , darkness, emptiness, inertia are the tenets, is given an incongruous energy, a visual excitement. Beckett's verbal and lighting rhythms are transformed into those of editing. Life in hell no longer seems that dull and repetitive; neither, by extension, do our own lives. The intrusive, oppressive interrogation of the light becomes the more distanced voyeurism of the camera - it is not this latter that breaks the space but the editing.

This is an excellent example of an artist freeing himself from constraints, undermining his text, while remaining superficially faithful. Surely the appropriate response to 'Play' is to play. A very brave adaptation.

This adaptation is one of the most impressive of the often variable series of Beckett on Film productions. Anthony Minghella - I must admit I have not seen his well known films - is spot-on with an interesting interpretation; replacing the quick-fire spotlighting of a dark stage with subtly worked angles, and largely close ups of the three main actors.

Juliet Stevenson, Kristin Scott Thomas and Alan Rickman are magnificent; what a task it must have been to have learned all those rapid-fire lines. The camera itself is a player, with its buzzing, denoting fore-grounding and focus on characters. A brilliant editing job is achieved; the play's cyclic repetition is negotiating excellently. This is a very inscrutable text at first viewing, but considering the same material is repeated, many of the verbal tricks become clearer. A convoluted narrative, made up of three different perspectives; always, the language is masterful in its precision.

A fine adaptation; perfectly captures the material of a sometimes-overlooked play: one of Beckett's shorter and less lauded works, but one every bit as deadening and obliquely shattering in its impact as the others.

Rating:- **** 1/2/*****

Play by Samuel Beckett, this film is available on You Tube. Stars Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliet Stevenson

This film would do the micro machine man proud. I came across it on PBS in progress. I quickly switched on the cc on my TV to see if it could assist my understanding, but the captions could not keep up. It was even hard to tell if the characters were enunciating properly. The frantic pace and striking utterances go far to stir the emotions. It was so intriguing that I plan to read the script and see if I can rent the short somewhere. I also think CK will attempt to rip this play off for one of its commercials.

This, being cutting-edge modern drama, I approached with not a little trepidation when Channel Four started its "Becket on Film" season. I'd already watched the five-minute short "Catastrophe" with John Gielgud and I didn't know what the hell that was on about.

For the newcomer, "Play" is bizarre and difficult to get to grips with. Three disembodied heads gabble away incessantly in monotone voices, each relating their own versions of a love triangle while a frantic CCTV camera cuts between them. I applaud Becket's decision to play the story twice, as otherwise I would not have fully appreciated this complex tale.

Essentially, "Play" is "Rashomon" at Warp 9. The shaky, noisy camera cuts between the three heads (Kristin Scott Thomas, Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson) as they fulfill their punishment to talk about their sins for eternity. It gets more and more frantic,cutting away first in mid-speech, then in mid-sentence, then in mid-word. Then Stevenson starts laughing hysterically. At times the film itself breaks down, as if it has been retrieved from hell itself.

At the end of 15 frantic minutes I was left a little confused by the three-layer dialogue. I shall need to watch this a few times, preferably with a script, to pick out the separate narrative strands. However, Minghella's direction was nothing short of sensational. He may have taken liberties with Becket's original text, but the rapid cross-cutting, repetition and the intrusive whir or the camera as it selected its target, made for one of the most breathtaking fifteen minutes of film I have ever had the privilege to see. This will not appeal to everyone, but I recommend it to the more adventurous viewer.