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m Robot - Speedily moving category Samuel Beckett plays to Plays by Samuel Beckett per CFD. |
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We hear a voice and assume it belongs to the man we are looking at, at least it is his thoughts we hear. He is remembering the circumstances under which he has seen the woman in the past. While he remembers we see M1, his remembered/imagined self, go through the motions described, at least what little actually takes place in the circle of light. He changes his mind about what causes her to appear. At first he says, “When I thought of her…”<ref>Beckett, S., ''Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 259</ref> but he realises that is inaccurate; the woman simply ''appears'' to him, and always at night. He goes over his routine, carefully starting from his return home after walking the roads since daybreak:<ref>Both in his biography of Beckett (''Damned to Fame'' p 634) and in a chapter within his book ''Frescoes of the Skull'' (p 261), James Knowlson draws a parallel with this man and the type of characters written by [[John Millington Synge|Synge]].</ref> he enters, goes to the closet and swaps his [[greatcoat]] and hat for a nightgown and cap, then he enters his sanctum and tries to summon her, always without joy, whereupon at dawn he dresses again and heads out on the road.
The voice lists the three instances listed above where the woman has appeared to him in the past. When he reaches the third one the camera cuts to the woman’s face, “reduced as far as possible to eyes and a mouth”<ref name="multiref4"/>, which mouths silently along with the voice, “…clouds…but the clouds…of the sky…”<ref name="shorter plays page 261">Beckett, S., ''Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 261</ref> The man then realises there is a fourth case, but not really a fourth ''[[per se]]'' because so much of the time, by far the greatest amount of the time, nothing happens, the woman never even appears.
Although from the opening scene it seems like he spends every night willing the woman to appear, this isn’t the case. Sometimes he grows weary and occupies himself with other things “more … rewarding, such as … [[cube root]]s”<ref
We see M1 prepare for the road again and leave. The voice says, “Right,” then the woman’s face appears once more and the voice repeats the final four lines of Yeats’s poem. This time, however, the woman does not mouth the words. Her face dissolves, we are left with the man sitting at his invisible table where we began and everything fades to black.
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