Interpretations
The whole play's structure is circular ("ring" like). It is divided into three exactly equal segments of seven lines during which a character exits and comes back in after completing their circuit, taking a different seat to the one they sat on originally. In this sense the characters also move around their seats in a ring shape.
Some speculate as to what the characters are discussing. From each response (Ru: (about Vi), "Does she not realise?" Vi: (about Flo), "Has she not been told?" Flo: (about Ru), "Does she not know?") it is not unreasonable to assume that each is in fact terminally ill but unaware of the fact. "The unspoken nature of the condemnation in the final version is more powerful precisely because it is less explicit. For while it leaves a mystery unresolved, it also tends to lead one beyond the particular illness of an individual woman to embrace the fate of all mankind."
The play might be seen as a coming of age situation. Vi yearns for the "old days", presumably when there were no awful secrets to tell but, at the same time, to which all three characters know there is no return. On one level "there is a sense of loss in the play, that the women will never regain the intimacy they once had together" … ‘Why does it have to be that they have lost something, why can it not be Beckett's longing for intimacy that they have and he can’t?’" Anthony Roche agrees: "hey assert a strength through their interdependence which makes this play one of the most perfect theatrical ensembles ever devised."
The joining of the hands evokes the symbol for infinity. "The ritual gesture of clasped hands allows them to keep their secrets from each other, but the feeling of the rings evokes the cycle of time. Twice turned upon itself, the bond of the three women (forever linked in their untold secrets) is never again what it was, never again what it seems to be. Something is the same, and everything is different." "Superficially they make us think of the Three Graces as they link hands, but, more precisely, they resemble in appearance the three mothers in Fritz Lang's M, a film much loved by Beckett."
Whereas at the start of the play there is a reluctance to talk of the past, after each of the shocking revelations the three women willingly drift off into nostalgia at the end as a means of coping with the present.
The rings that Flo says she feels "may be imagined a symbol of the frustrated hopes of youth, of marriages that never occurred or equally their eternal union" that has kept them together throughout their personal tragedies.
"Ethereal though the women of Come and Go might be, they are substantial personae in comparison with the wraith-like beings of the ‘supplication plays.’ And painful though the shock to their sensibilities has been, they have the comforting presence of each other to offset their sadness. They comprise a community, and are therefore not wholly reliant on memory to remedy or sedate. No such comfort is available in the later dramaticules, however, where night after night alienated beings implore their loved ones to make their presence felt."
Read more about this topic: Come And Go