Janusz Pyda OP: We began our discussion of Not I by considering Beckett's use of the technique of reduction, and I remarked on the unwavering consistency with which he gradually reduced his characters on the stage: from Winnie, reduced to a torso and then just a head, through the protagonists in Play, who are just faces, to the woman in Not I, who is just a mouth speaking in the dark. You augmented this collection by tossing in the man from the one-act television play Eh Joe, written in 1966 between Play and Not I, and you said that the reduction process was not a purely formal experiment, done for the sake of it, but a technique with a specific end in view, namely to help us identify the limits of humanity and its inalienable and irreducible elements.

Now we turn to That Time, a play written in 1974– 75, immediately after Not I. Here, too, we have just one character and a voice, and one might expect an even further-reaching reduction than in Not I – for instance, just a voice in the dark, or something altogether different, a startlingly new way of distilling a character. But no. True, the source of the voice – or rather, the voices, as there are three – is invisible and shrouded in darkness. But instead of something even smaller than a mouth, we are back to a whole head. This time it is the head of an old man, and it is suspended in the dark about ten feet above stage level – more or less the same height as the Mouth in Not I.

How do you interpret this? Doesn't it destroy the consistency, at least at the level of the stage setting? Isn't it a step backwards, however small? Isn't Beckett repeating himself here?

Antoni Libera: Beckett's work does indeed display an unwavering consistency in its reductionism, and its effect is to impress a certain pattern on our minds and make us think according to it, so that we are aware of an abstract evolution from speech to silence, from light to darkness, from the visible presence of a character to its absence, in short from something to nothing. But we shouldn't give this undue prominence or expect it to be rigidly applied; it isn't an ironclad or absolute rule.