That Time is a short play (about eight pages) by Samuel Beckett in which the only thing seen on stage is a face and the only things heard are three voices. The voices, A, B, and C, alternate throughout the play with only two pauses, which consist of the termination of one of the voices' monologues, the listener's eyes opening, one of the voices starting to speak again, and the eyes closing. The distinctions between voices are not always clear because some of the text is the same and some images are common among them, such as a stone or slab which the speaker sits upon or remembers sitting upon.

The voices seem to represent the same person at different points in his life: voice A in middle age trying to remember his childhood, voice B in childhood, and voice C presumably in old age (Acheson and Arthur 121-126). The play is entirely lacking in punctuation, and because of this and the switches from voice to voice, the meanings of the narratives given by each voice are ambiguous. The text of play is difficult to read and understand due to the style in which it was written and the organization, and similarly, the end does not seem to really conclude the play: the eyes open after the voices stop, and 5 seconds later, the face smiles. After rereading the text, themes and images are easier to pick up, and different meanings can be found.

The Face and Stage Layout

The listener's face in That Time is “10 feet above the stage level off center . . . [with] long flaring white hair as if seen from above outspread” (Beckett 228). Only the face of this person is seen, and with the hair spread out as it is, it sounds as if the audiences is looking down upon the man covered up in bed. The rest of the stage is left a dark void, which causes the audience's attention to be drawn to the face, but the face is off center, showing that it, although the only tangible character, should not be the focus of attention.

The three voices speak continuously through the play with the exception of the two pauses and the last twenty-three seconds of the play. The switch between voices is intended to be “clearly faintly perceptible” (Beckett 227). The three voices come from different positions around the stage and have three different pitches but run together enough that the switch is smooth and not discontinuous. The voice pattern before the first break is ACB ACB ACB CAB; the next pattern is CBA CBA CBA BCA; and the third is BAC BAC BAC BAC. The fact that the pattern is not disturbed at the end of the third sequence is one explanation for the smile seen on the face at the end of the play: “In the third section Listener can take some pleasure in the restoration of order . . . as the BAC pattern is retained throughout the third part” (Gontarski 158). This explanation, though, is rather weak, because Beckett changed the pattern only in the last revision, and so it is an unlikely explanation for the smile, which had been previously written into the play (Gontarski 158).

Images and Recurring Themes

Each voice in That Time has a subject area independent of the others at first, but as the play progresses, connections are made through common images and recurring themes. The weather is described in B and C frequently, and in A and B sitting on a stone in the sunlight often is mentioned, and in C sitting on a slab in the portrait gallery seems to correspond to the others. The fact that the man's father and mother both are dead is stated in A and C, and the green coat left for him by his father is described in A and C.

In each voice, the idea that the person is making up people or events is stated or suggested, as when voice B says, “Just one of those things you kept making up to keep out the void” (Beckett 230). This also leads up to the eventual loneliness in voice B when he admits that he keeps making up the same scene, which then brings into question whether the girl in the earlier scene is real (Beckett 233). This new solitude in B then starts to parallel the theme of solitude in A and C that is apparent throughout the work. In C, the man is ignored by the people around him: “The eyes passing over you and through you like so much thin air” (Beckett 234). In A the man goes back to the places of childhood mentioned in B apparently to restore his memories of childhood and presumably to defy the solitude, but his attempt fails and he leaves has he comes: alone.

The Use of Time

As appropriate to the title, That Time, the phrase “that time.” or a derivation of it, is used about thirty-five times in the play. The first two words of the play are “that time,” and the last two are “no time” (Beckett 228-235). The voices are trying throughout the play to place all the events in the right time order and also remember when in particular an event took place: “Was that the time or was that another time” (Beckett 231). This point becomes even more important when considering the people in the audience: they are sitting in the dark watching the play; they do not know what time it is or how long they have been there; and since the play does not appear to have a distinct story line to follow, an immediate end is never clearly in sight. To the audience, time has little meaning.

The Theme of Sleep

In That Time many different images and themes point to sleep and dreaming, and even in earlier manuscripts of the play, the head of the listener is resting on a pillow, as if in bed trying to sleep (Gontarski 155). The pause in the voices causes a change in face each time: the man's eyes open three seconds after the voice stops and do not close until three seconds after another voice starts. These disruptions seem to be very similar to being disturbed from sleep: dreams usually stop a moment before consciousness, and dreams, or the thoughts leading up to dreams, usually start just before unconsciousness. Also, a person's respiration rate increases just as he or she wakes up, which would explain the listener's breath being audible in the pauses.

Time is not a tangible concept in sleep, and so the blur of time and events might be how the listener remembers the dreams just after he wakes up: certain images and themes seem clear (such as the stone and the weather), but all the dreams and specific details become indistinct. Dreams often seem to have some base in reality but also have extra oddities thrown in, and so, parts of the images could be real, but nothing is very tangible. The girl that voice B mentions, for example, is there on the edge of his vision and her presence if can be felt, but he never has any real contact with her. She is merely an image and later disappears.

The dreams could be recurring, hence, “Just another of those tales to keep the void from pouring in on top of you” (Beckett 230). They could also be some remembrance of childhood or just three different night mares about being abandoned: A starts out looking for something that he never finds and is alone the whole time; B starts with the girl but ends up alone; C is alone the whole time. If this indeed the case, then the smile at the end of the play could be because of all the dreams disappear leaving him no thoughts of the events of the dreams: “When you opened your eyes from floor to ceiling nothing only dust and not a sound only what was it it said come and gone was that it something like that come and gone come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time” (Beckett 235).

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