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. Synopsis Diffuse 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. All is lit dimly. This invites us, along with a lack of any specified internal staging to focus on listening as the primary way to experience the play. Speaker “tells a ‘story’ of a man so much like himself that it is easy to suppose that 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. The birth/death dyad is announced in the opening line: Birth was the death of him." This pervades the play and appears in various forms throughout much of Beckett's writing. Speaker goes on to describe the man’s efforts to light an old-fashioned oil lamp in great detail. The linguistic discipline and repetition of precise phrases lends a ritualistic quality to these sequences which end in reduced light as he lastly "turns wick low." This sequence of variations ultimately reduces to the single word: "lights" closer to ending the play. In the initial, larger variations he uses up three matches in the process each