A Piece of Monologue

A Piece of Monologue is a fifteen-minute play by Samuel Beckett. Written between 2 October 1977 and 28 April 1979 it followed a request for a “play about death” by the actor David Warrilow who starred in the premiere in the Annex at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York on 14 December 1979.

The light fades up on a room in which a white-haired old man – identified simply as Speaker – stands motionless facing a blank wall. To his left is a standard lamp the same height as the actor with a globe about the size of a human skull; it is faintly lit. Just visible to his extreme right is the white foot of a pallet bed. “[I]t is much like the room in the television play Ghost Trio, although without the mirror.” The man is wearing a white nightgown and white bed-socks. After a ten-second pause the actor begins speaking and continues without a break till the end of the play.

Speaker “tells a ‘story’ of a man so much like himself that it is clear he is simply speaking of himself in the third person" who is first seen staring out of a window at “that black vast.” He has been contemplating the length of his life, which he totals up to “two and a half billion seconds” or “thirty thousand nights.” (This works out to 79 years of seconds and 82 years of nights ). He focuses at first on only two things, being handed around as an infant and the various funerals that have punctuated his time on earth.

Speaker describes the man’s efforts to light an old-fashioned oil lamp in great detail. He uses up three matches in the process.

Now able to see the man turns eastward to face a blank wall. This appears to be a nightly ritual. The wall that the man stands before used to be “covered with pictures” of once “loved ones” (an expression he doggedly avoids saying). He looks at some of marks left on the wall and remembers a photo of his father, one of his mother, one of them on their wedding day – “the dead and gone” – and one of “He alone” which is likely one of himself – “the dying and the going.” These have been “ripped from the wall and torn to shreds” though not in a single emotional scene, as with the character O in Film, but rather over a period of time and then swept “under the bed with the dust and spiders.”

Speaker describes going to the window and lighting the lamp again and then a third time only this time a single lighted spill (a slender piece of wood or of twisted paper, for lighting lamps, etc.) is used rather than the matches.

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