Play examines characters who have locked themselves in a vicious circle of passions that will not let them respond to the call to clarity that is the challenge at the heart of human existence. In the process of exploring this theme this play develops further and make particularly clear an important feature of Beckett's art that has become especially prominent in his later work: his great concern with aesthetic form. All of Beckett's work uses carefully developed formal patterns in its embodiment of his themes, but Play uses an elaborate formal structure to which there is a musical parallel. He weaves three voices in and out of thematic patterns in a manner resembling that of a musical trio.

The three voices are those of a man, his wife, and his mistress, called in the stage directions M, W1, and W2. The play studies the relations among these three characters -- a love triangle -- and their reactions to the situation they find themselves in after death: forced to think and talk by a light which moves from one to another, opening and closing their streams of voice and weaving them into intricate contrapuntal patterns. As the audience watches and listens to them, the pleasure it derives is both in the perception of aesthetic form and in the perception of the enhanced meaning this form expresses as the three streams reflect upon and illuminate each other.

The work is divided into sections resembling the movements of a piece of music, with themes moving from voice to voice until the voices come together into choruses to open
and close the sections. The opening is a chorus on the present situation, a post-mortem
state in which the characters find themselves in urns in the dark except for the times when the light shines on them. Although they are side by side, the man in the middle and the two women beside him, they are not conscious of each other, only of themselves, the darkness, and the light. After this opening chorus there is a pause of about five seconds, then another blackout, after which the spot makes them speak individually, shifting back and forth among them. This section presents their memories of the affair, recounted in parallel, and then closes with another blackout. One might say that this first movement has a single theme, memory, but transmuted in three different voices according to the opposing points of view of the characters.

The second section, which opens with another chorus, is much more complex. It has two themes, and the voices move from one to the other and back again in a very intricate pattern. The themes are : (1) the present situation and the meaning of the light, and (2) speculations on what might be happening at present on earth. The second is turned to as an escape from the frustration of not being able to solve the problem presented by the first. It is significant that the first to turn to the second theme is the man : he is the weakest willed of the group, the one most inclined now, just as when he was alive, to try to escape from the inhospitable, cold world of reality into the kind of fantasy that he tried to act out in his relationship with his mistress. The second is the mistress, and the last is the toughest, and also most self-centered, of the three, the wife.

Schematically presented, the permutations in this movement fall into pattern like this: 

The light (present situation)              The earth (escape)
       M, W1, W2                               
       W1, W2                                         M,
       W1                                               M, W2
       M, W2                                          W1  
       W1, W2                                         M
       M, W1, W2      

As this diagram makes clear, M is the most inclined of the three to seek escape, and it also might be worth noting that when he is not either by himself or with the group as whole, he tends to associate with W2, his mistress : he always did find her more congenial than his wife.

At the end of this section the opening chorus returns. The play is repeated; directors have the option of repeating the whole play or a selected section (though Beckett always opted for the former). Then it closes for the second time with a slight variation - M is going to open instead of W1 - but with no essential change. Evidently as long as the characters cling to the patterns of thought that got them into this situation, they will never break out of it.  

However, there are also indications that to break out of it would be possible and that they are actually being challenged to do so. As the light shines on them, setting their streams of consciousness and speech in movement, it seems to them  that it is demanding something and that satisfaction of its demand would deliver them finally into silence, darkness, and rest. And that this is not simply idle speculation  or self-deluding hope on their parts is indicated by references in the notes to the light as an "inquisitor" and to the characters as its "victims" (p. 62). When the Unnamable, in his own state of life after death, speculated on the possibility  of a similar meaning of the lights that were shining on him and forcing him to think and talk, there was nothing to indicate that this hypothesis had any more substance to it than any one of the many others his mind secreted like cobwebs, but in this case the authorial voice has given independent support to the idea.

  What, then, is it that the light demands? Since it is an "inquisitor," it must be searching for truth, and the uncovering of this truth would evidently require each character's recognition of the reality of his life. This would involve not only a frank confession of moral deficiencies in the usual sense, of which these characters have plenty, but also the same kind of absolute clarity about existence to which we have seen so many of Beckett's characters called.

As the light probes, their personalities unfold before us. The man, for example, is a vividly earthy character; sexually potent- "What a male!" exclaims his  wife at one point on thinking of how he managed to keep both her and the mistress physically satisfied for so long - but weak and vacillating as a person. His polygamous tendency appears to be the result of both of these characteristics : his appetites lead him to take a second woman, and his weakness of character makes it impossible for him to choose between the two no matter how uncomfortable the conflict between them makes him. His ideal would be an affair both women would tolerate, and his fantasies about how pleasant a life of that sort might have been have a languorous quality that corresponds to his intrinsic lassitude. "To think we were never together. . . . Never woke together, on a May morning, the first to wake to wake the other two. Then in a little dinghy . . . on the river, I resting on my oars, they lolling on air-cushions in the stern . . . sheets. Drifting Such fantasies"(pp. 59-60).

His wife, on the other hand, is a very active, fiercely aggressive person. She lives for personal power, and her husband's value to her seems to be largely that of a possession, an object over which she can assert absolute power. Characteristically, her highest idea of happiness during the part of her life she recounts was to be able to lay claim to uncontested ownership over him : "So he was mine again. All mine. I was happy again. I went about singing. The world - " (p. 51). The world was in her possession, she probably means. And in her exuberance at the victory of her power, she even, characteristically again, went to the mistress to gloat over her in her defeat. In fact, victory seems to have been even sweeter to her than peaceful possession without battle would have been, since it gave her a new instrument to use against her husband to reduce him to complete submission. M remembers how she used to torment him with it and how he used to knuckle under : "I ran into your ex-doxy, she said one night, on the pillow, you're well out of that. Rather uncalled for, I thought. I am indeed, sweetheart, I said, I am indeed. God what vermin women. Thanks to you, angel, I said" (p. 51).

The mistress is the most sensitive of the group and the most concerned with specifically personal relationships, as compared with the relatively impersonal kind of relationship one has with possessions  or slaves. It was this that made her become entangled with M, and it was for the sake of a more adequate personal relationship, rather than for the sake of a greater degree of power, that she wanted M to choose her exclusively in place of his wife. And now, in the state after death, the same tendency makes her seek a relationship with the light; always laving been a person who lived for the eyes of others, she tries to imagine the light as looking upon her with personal concern, feeling anger, sympathy, and so on:

  You might get angry and blaze me clean out of my wits. Mightn't you? . . . But I  
  doubt it. It would not be like you somehow. And you must know I am doing my   
  best. Or don't you? . . . Are you listening to me? Is anyone looking at me? Is      
  anyone bothering about me at all?
                                                                                     [pp. 54-55]