Play: That Time

Overview
Samuel Beckett’s That Time (1976) is a compact, late play built around a single face suspended in darkness and three disembodied voices that circle through fragments of memory. There is no conventional plot or action. The drama arises from the interplay between the silent “Listener” and the recorded voices, which speak in the second person and return again and again to scenes prefaced by the refrain “that time,” assembling a mosaic of a life without ever fixing it into a continuous story. Time, selfhood, and recollection become the true subjects, enacted as sound and light rather than narrated in a linear sequence.

Staging and Device
Only the Listener’s head is visible, high and isolated, held in a tight shaft of light. He does not speak. Instead, three voices, often designated A, B, and C, sound from different directions, each linked to a particular angle of the Listener’s gaze. The precise choreography of lighting and head movement is crucial: a slight shift of the eyes or tilt of the chin signals which voice is active, as if the Listener turns inward toward separate chambers of memory. Beckett’s score-like directions regulate entries, pauses, and duration, creating a pattern in which the voices alternate, recur, and overlap, gradually filling a shared space of recollection.

The Voices
Each voice carries a distinct temporal coloring. One evokes childhood and early youth: lone rambles by the water, the pull of home places, a first sense of being outside the circle of others. Another inhabits middle years: the city at night, libraries and waiting rooms, half-hearted attempts to belong or to start again, the hum of routine, the stubborn drift of solitude. The third, closest to old age, retraces returns to abandoned sites, the body’s weariness, and the relentless need to keep the mind occupied with remembered rooms, roads, and faces. All three address the Listener as “you,” sounding like fragments of the same person at different stages, or like inner voices that will not let him settle. They do not narrate events so much as conjure textures: a stairwell, a shoreline, light on stone, the rustle of pages, a doorway watched too long. The refrain “that time” staples these shards together while also keeping them apart, pointing to moments that seem vivid yet remain out of reach.

Pattern and Rhythm
The play’s motion is cyclical. The voices enter in turn, break off, and resume, as if each attempt to make a story coalesces only to fray again. Silence, measured and shaped, anchors the speech, and the Listener’s immobility gives the sound an echoing depth. The effect is musical: recurring motifs, subtle variations, crescendos of insistence that ebb into quiet. The Listener’s small reactions, an alerting of the eyes, a fractional lift or drop of the head, become the play’s physical action, registering recognition, resistance, and fatigue.

Ending
As the sequences complete their circuit, the voices wane. What remains is the image of the head held in its cone of light, listening for the next “that time” that will not come. The life summoned never resolves into an account; it persists as a set of returns. The final silence is not empty but charged with all that has been rehearsed and cannot quite be possessed, leaving the Listener, and the audience, suspended between memory’s compulsion and its failure to deliver a definitive past.