Play: Come and Go

Overview
Samuel Beckett's Come and Go (1965) is a minute but intricately patterned one-act that distills friendship, time, and mortality into a ritual of entrances, exits, and whispers. Three women, childhood companions now aged, sit on a narrow bench and perform a precise choreography of speech and silence. In a few pages, Beckett compresses decades of shared history, hints of illness and loss, and the fragile consolations of companionship into a structure as spare as it is resonant.

Characters and Setup
The play features three figures, Flo, Vi, and Ru, whose abbreviated names evoke a girlish intimacy and, by association, color and jewel tones. They are dressed alike in hats and coats, their posture and etiquette recalling schoolroom decorum. Their first spoken line, "When did we three last meet?", positions the action within the uncertainty of recollection. They sit facing front on a bench, hands in laps, the set nearly bare. The atmosphere is hushed, with lighting and movement calibrated to the smallest turn of the head or shift of a hand.

Action and Pattern
The drama unfolds as a formal game of absence and disclosure. One woman quietly rises and steps away; the two remaining lean together and whisper about the one who has just gone. The secrets are not for the audience's ears in performance, though the script intimates their tenor: each pair shares grave news about the absent friend, a suggestion of an incurable condition or impending death. When the third returns, the whispered pair falls silent; another departs; the pattern repeats, and then repeats once more, so that each woman becomes in turn the subject of pity and the repository of secrecy.

The spoken fragments the audience does hear are simple and laden: "Does she not know?", "God grant not", "Any pain?", "Hardly any". The effect is that of a circle of mercy and deception, where compassion demands concealment. None of the three appears aware of her own supposed fate, yet each colludes in sheltering the others, a triangle of affection suspended over an abyss left unnamed.

Memory, Ritual, and Ambiguity
Between whispers, their talk returns to schooldays under Miss Wade, to games and shared benches, flimsy memories that create a counterpoint to the ominous confidences. The structure is ritualistic, each movement is repeated with variations, so that time feels folded. Past and present overlap in gestures: the request "Let us hold hands" leads to the final tableau where they clasp hands as "in the old days", and one says, "I can feel the rings", a tactile proof of years lived and a hint of separate, unspoken lives beyond the bench.

Style and Effect
Beckett hinges the play on what is withheld. Language is pared to syllables; meaning resides in pauses, seating permutations, and the weight of a whisper. The audible text floats over a submerged drama the audience must infer, producing a tension between knowledge and ignorance mirrored among the three. The symmetry of the design, each woman both spared and doomed in the others' eyes, creates a delicate equilibrium between terror and tenderness.

Closing Image
The final image of three interlaced hands, faces forward, offers solace without certainty. The women neither confront nor escape their implied destinies; they merely sit together, sharing warmth and pressure through the faint sensation of rings. The title's motion, come and go, names their choreography and life itself: arrivals, departures, and the brief intervals of touch that make them bearable.