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Play (1963), by Samuel Beckett
Three alone, condemned to speech, to utter the account of an adulterous affair, in all its banality and grievance, the suffering it caused, and not only the pain incurred at the time but the pain caused by remembering. Their voices could be those of people in therapy, obsessively returning to the trauma (whether great or petty) and unable to evaluate it differently, to see it from a different perspective, to get past the sticking points, leaving them overwhelmed by the same words as always. The urns and the encrusted faces suggest the souls of the damned in limbo, or in Dante's Purgatorio (remember that Beckett was a lifelong reader of Dante and that he underwent extensive psychoanalysis in the 1930s), souls locked forever in a place where they will relive their sins forever, knowing that hell is an eternity of repetition, never once being able to feel the sweet release into silence.
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