Келіп-Кету: Беккеттің қысқа пьесасы

1965 play by Samuel Beckett
the short play

Come and Go is a short play (described as a "dramaticule" on its title page) by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in January 1965 and first performed (in German) at the Schillertheater, Berlin on 14 January 1966. Its English language premiere was at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin on 28 February 1968, and its British premiere was at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 9 December 1968. It was written for and dedicated to the publisher John Calder. Some critics consider this one of Beckett's most "perfect" plays: Beckett agonized over each individual line until they exactly matched his creative vision. The play varies between "121 and 127 words" in length, depending on the translation (his notes are significantly longer than the actual play), and as such is rarely performed on its own.

The whole play's structure is circular (ring like). It is divided into three exactly equal segments of seven lines during which a character exits and comes back in after completing their circuit, taking a different seat to the one they sat on originally. In this sense the characters also move around their seats in a ring shape. Some speculate as to what the characters are discussing. From each response (Ru: (about Vi), "Does she not realise?" Vi: (about Flo), "Has she not been told?" Flo: (about Ru), "Does she not know?") it is not unreasonable to assume that each, perhaps, is in fact terminally ill but unaware of the fact. "The unspoken nature of the condemnation in the final version is more powerful [than in Human Wishes (see below)] precisely because it is less explicit. For while it leaves a mystery unresolved, it also tends to lead one beyond the particular illness of an individual woman to embrace the fate of all mankind." Other possibilities include a yet to be made public death or some other tragedy involving a personal connection to whatever is whispered for the absent character being whispered about. The play might be seen as a coming of age situation. Vi yearns for the "old days", Anthony Roche agrees: "[T]hey assert a strength through their interdependence which makes this play one of the most perfect theatrical ensembles ever devised." The joining of the hands evokes the symbol for infinity. "The ritual gesture of clasped hands allows them to keep their secrets from each other, but the feeling of the rings evokes the cycle of time. Twice turned upon itself, the bond of the three women (forever linked in their untold secrets) is never again what it was, never again what it seems to be. Something is the same, and everything is different." "Superficially they make us think of the Three Graces as they link hands, but, more precisely, they resemble in appearance the three mothers in Fritz Lang's M, a film much loved by Beckett." Whereas at the start of the play there is a reluctance to talk of the past, after each of the shocking revelations the three women willingly drift off into nostalgia as a means of coping with the present. The rings that Flo says she feels "may be imagined a symbol of the frustrated hopes of youth, of marriages that never occurred [or failed] or equally their eternal union" that has kept them together throughout their personal tragedies. Or, perhaps, these women meet/exist outside of time and whatever rings they might have once worn have disappeared along the way. "Ethereal though the women of Come and Go might be, they are substantial personae in comparison with the wraith like beings of the ‘supplication plays.’ And painful though the shock to their sensibilities has been, they have the comforting presence of each other to offset their sadness. They comprise a community, and are therefore not wholly reliant on memory to remedy or sedate. No such comfort is available in the later dramaticules, however, where night after night alienated beings implore their loved ones to make their presence felt."

"Morehampton House, [in Dublin] had originally been run by three spinster sisters and was commonly known as "Miss Wade's."

In 1936 Beckett began a full length play entitled Human Wishes (after the poem by Dr Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes). It was abandoned but in 1980 he allowed a fragment of this is to be published in Ruby Cohn's Just Play and was later made more widely available in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment edited by Cohn. "When the curtain rises, three women are seated, presumably encircled by the long gowns of the time [18th Century]. Mrs Williams is meditating, Mrs Desmoulins is knitting and Miss Carmichael is reading. During the course of the scene the latter two rise and temporarily leave their seats, but Mrs Williams's actions are confined to striking the floor with her stick." Beckett may have been "motivated by the theme he clearly wishes to pursue: Johnson in love" but that is not what he ended up writing about. "The "three women look as though they might have emerged from tragedy. Their dialogue – especially Mrs Williams's lines – occasionally recalls Restoration comedy, but its substratum is human mortality, without hope of restoration. [On the other hand r]ather than explicit references to death, Come and Go spirals delicately around absence and threat." "However, more than death, it is ‘the peevishness of decay’ that pervades the scene, illustrated by the petty bickering and punctuated by the repeated silences that threaten to stop what action there is." "The play fragment also points forward to the elegant, old fashioned language and formalised syntax of the three women in Come and Go."