Waiting for Godot

• 1. Introduction

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  Waiting for Godot arrived in Paris in January 1953 with only 2,500 copies of its French text in print and a production so underfunded that the prop suitcase had been pulled from a city rubbish bin. Yet within two years, a London critic would declare it the sensation of the season, and by 1998 the Royal National Theatre would poll its peers and find it voted the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century. What could a two-act play in which, as critic Vivian Mercier famously put it, nothing happens, twice, possibly do to earn that verdict? Who is Godot, and why does his perpetual absence matter? How did Samuel Beckett, an Irish author writing in French in postwar Paris, create something so stripped down and so permanent? And what does it say about us that the play has since been staged in prisons, in bombed-out neighborhoods, and on Broadway with Robin Williams and Steve Martin, and still refuses to yield a single definitive answer?

• 2. Origins and Composition

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  Beckett completed the original French text between the 9th of October 1948 and the 29th of January 1949, in a burst of writing he sometimes described as emerging from states close to a trance. He subtitled the work a tragicomedy in two acts, and its full French title was En attendant Godot. The play was first published in September 1952 by Les Editions de Minuit, with only 2,500 copies in that first edition.

  Beckett later recalled that the painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon, made by Caspar David Friedrich in 1819, was a major source for the work. He had seen it on a journey to Germany in 1936. The image of two figures standing before an indifferent landscape, motionless and watching, sits close to the heart of what the play becomes on stage.

  Two possible inspirations for the name Godot have been floated. The first traces it to the French slang for boot, godillot or godasse, consistent with the play's recurring obsession with aching feet. The second comes from an encounter Beckett described at the French Tour de France bicycle race, where a group of spectators told him they were waiting for a competitor named Godot. Beckett also mentioned to critic Hugh Kenner a veteran racing cyclist, described only as bald and a stayer, whose surname was Godeau and who was a recurrent placeman in national championships. Beckett himself said later that he regretted choosing the name, because of all the theories involving God to which it gave rise. He told Ralph Richardson directly: "I also told Richardson that if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly."

  When he translated the play into English, Beckett did not simply produce a word-for-word rendering. He deliberately introduced Irish idioms, specifically Dublin speech patterns, and gave Pozzo's pipe a brand-name: Kapp and Peterson, the best-known tobacconists in Dublin. He also stripped out biographical details, producing what he called a general vaguening of the text, a process he continued for the rest of his life.

• 3. The Paris Premiere

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  Roger Blin directed the world premiere, which opened on the 5th of January 1953 at the Theatre de Babylone in Paris. Thirty reviewers attended the final rehearsal before the public opening, and contrary to later legend, they were largely kind. Reviews in the weekly press were longer and more enthusiastic, and they appeared in time to draw audiences to what became a thirty-day run.

  The production was assembled on an extremely thin budget. Blin asked each actor to identify a physical ailment that would express their character. Pierre Latour, who played Estragon, concentrated on bad feet. Lucien Raimbourg as Vladimir emphasized prostate trouble. Blin himself played Pozzo as a man with heart difficulties, stepping into the role because the actor originally cast had found a better-paying job. Jean Martin played Lucky with the physical trembling of Parkinson's disease, an idea that came from a doctor named Marthe Gautier at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital. When Martin told Beckett he was playing Lucky as if he were suffering from Parkinson's, Beckett replied "Yes, of course", and mentioned that his own mother had had the disease.

  Not all early audiences were respectful. During one performance, the curtain had to come down after Lucky's monologue when around twenty well-dressed audience members began to whistle and jeer. One of them wrote a letter of complaint to Le Monde dated the 2nd of February 1953.

  Beckett himself did not attend the premiere, though he sent a polite note that Blin read aloud. In a written introduction for a radio broadcast that preceded the premiere, Beckett was already establishing the terms he would hold to for the rest of his life: "I don't know who Godot is. I don't even know, above all don't know, if he exists."

• 4. The Characters and Their Bodies

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  Vladimir and Estragon are never described as tramps in the text, though they are almost always staged in tramps' costumes. What Beckett was certain of was their hats. Director Roger Blin recalled Beckett saying: "The only thing I'm sure of is that they're wearing bowlers." Bowler hats were ordinary wear in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock where Beckett grew up, and his father William Beckett commonly wore one.

  The two men have been together for fifty years by the time the play begins, though they decline to reveal their ages when Pozzo asks. Their Hiberno-English speech, full of idioms rooted in Irish usage, marks them both as Irish. Their resemblance to Laurel and Hardy, particularly their bowlers and their trading of hats, was noted by critic Gerald Mast in The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, who described the hat-passing game and Lucky's inability to think without his hat as derivations from the comic pair.

  Vladimir stands for most of the play. Estragon sits repeatedly and even falls asleep, at which point he has nightmares he wishes to describe to Vladimir. Vladimir refuses to hear them, unable, it is said, to tolerate the sense of entrapment that the dreamer experiences. Estragon is absorbed by physical discomforts, by food and pain; Vladimir looks toward the sky and concerns himself with religious and philosophical questions. His hat and Estragon's boots become their respective visual obsessions. Al Alvarez wrote that Estragon's forgetfulness is the cement binding their relationship: "He continually forgets, Vladimir continually reminds him; between them they pass the time."

  Pozzo and Lucky have been together for sixty years. Lucky's long speech, delivered on Pozzo's command to think, has been described by Martin Esslin as a flood of meaningless gibberish. Beckett told the American director Alan Schneider that Pozzo should be played as a hypomaniac, the only way to play him, Beckett said, was to play him mad. Pozzo credits Lucky with having given him all the culture, refinement, and ability to reason that he possesses, even as he treats him with cruelty. When asked why Lucky was named as he was, Beckett replied: "I suppose he is lucky to have no more expectations."

  The boy who appears in both acts carries messages from Godot. In Act I he confirms he tends Godot's goats, while his brother, whom Godot beats, tends the sheep. In Act II he insists he has never visited before and has never met Vladimir. When Vladimir demands that the boy describe Godot, the boy says only: "He does nothing, sir" and that Godot has a white beard, though he is not entirely certain even of that.

• 5. Staging and Directorial Control

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  Beckett took complete control of a production for the first time in 1975, directing the play at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin with Walter Asmus as his assistant director. He described his vision for the staging with directness: "It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are lying on the ground, that cannot be handled naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality. It is a game in order to survive."

  The setting he described was minimal by design. There is only a country road and a tree, bare in Act I and sprouting a few leaves in Act II despite the script's indication that it is merely the following day. Beckett called for a lieu vague, a place that should not be particularized. When director Alan Schneider proposed staging it in the round, Beckett resisted, writing: "I don't in my ignorance agree with the round and feel Godot needs a very closed box." He also contemplated adding a faint shadow of bars on the stage floor, then decided against what he called that level of explicitation. In his 1975 Berlin production, James Knowlson described moments when Vladimir and Estragon appeared to bounce off something like birds trapped in an invisible net.

  Beckett was firm about what the characters meant in terms of their backstory and refused to supply any. When the actor Sir Ralph Richardson asked for the home address and curriculum vitae of Pozzo and made his willingness to play Vladimir contingent on receiving that information, Beckett told him plainly: "All I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that was true also of the other characters."

  He was equally resistant to the casting of women. When Dutch theatre company De Haarlemse Toneelschuur staged an all-female production in 1988, Beckett sued and, when that failed, issued a ban on all productions of his plays in the Netherlands. The ban was short-lived. In 1991, two years after Beckett's death, a French judge ruled that an all-female production would not cause excessive damage to his legacy, allowing the Brut de Beton theater company to perform it at the Avignon Festival, provided that an objection from Beckett's representative was read aloud before each performance. A court in Rome ruled similarly in 2006, allowing female actors to play Vladimir and Estragon in a production in Pontedera, Tuscany.

• 6. Prison, Protest, and Resonance

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  An inmate at Luttringhausen Prison near Remscheid in Germany obtained a copy of the French first edition, translated it himself into German, and staged the play. The first night was on the 29th of November 1953. The following October, the prisoner wrote to Beckett: "You will be surprised to be receiving a letter about your play Waiting for Godot, from a prison where so many thieves, forgers, toughs, homos, crazy men and killers spend this bitch of a life waiting and waiting and waiting. Waiting for what? Godot? Perhaps." Beckett was intensely moved. He intended to visit the prison but never managed to do so, and the experience marked, in the words of those close to him, the beginning of his enduring links with prisons and prisoners.

  In 1957, four years after the Paris premiere, Herbert Blau brought the play to San Quentin State Prison in California, where around 1,400 inmates attended a single night's performance. The play had a profound impact. The inmates formed a drama group and went on to produce seven of Beckett's works. Rick Cluchey, a former San Quentin prisoner, received financial and moral support from Beckett over many years and played Vladimir in two productions in the former Gallows room of the prison, which had been converted into a 65-seat theatre. Cluchey said: "The thing that everyone in San Quentin understood about Beckett, while the rest of the world had trouble catching up, was what it meant to be in the face of it."

  In November 2007, two performances were staged in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, two years after the neighborhood was devastated by the failure of the federal levee system during Hurricane Katrina. The production was staged by artist Paul Chan together with the Creative Time arts organization and the Classical Theatre of Harlem, and featured New Orleans native Wendell Pierce as Vladimir.

  The play's first Broadway revival, in 1957 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, featured an all-Black cast including Earle Hyman as Vladimir, Mantan Moreland as Estragon, Rex Ingram as Pozzo and Geoffrey Holder as Lucky, drawing on themes of the Africana absurd rather than the European absurd. Beckett sanctioned a multiracial production at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 1980 with John Kani and Winston Ntshona as Didi and Gogo and two white actors, Bill Flynn and Peter Piccolo, as Pozzo and Lucky. When the same production toured to the United States in 1981, it was picketed by anti-Apartheid demonstrators and the performances were canceled at the First International Baltimore Theatre Festival.

• 7. Interpretations Beckett Resisted

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  Beckett tired quickly of what he called the endless misunderstanding. As early as 1955 he asked, "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can't make out." He was also willing to be cryptic: when actor Peter Woodthorpe asked him in a taxi what the play was really about, Beckett answered: "It's all symbiosis, Peter; it's symbiosis."

  The theological readings were the most persistent. The play draws explicitly on the story of the two thieves from Luke 23:39-43, includes the figures of a shepherd and a goatherd tended by the absent Godot, and has Vladimir crying out "Christ have mercy upon us!" Biographer Anthony Cronin noted that Beckett always kept a Bible, and more than one edition in his later years, alongside Bible concordances. Beckett himself acknowledged: "Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar so I naturally use it." He also conceded that despite his insistence that Godot was not God, he could not pretend to be unaware of the meanings people attached to the name, adding that if that meaning was in his writing it was somewhere in his unconscious and he was not overtly aware of it.

  The play was written shortly after the end of World War II, during which Beckett and his partner had been forced to flee occupied Paris to avoid arrest because of their involvement with the French Resistance. After the war, Beckett volunteered for the Red Cross in Saint-Lo, a French city almost completely destroyed during the D-Day fighting. Those experiences led commentators including Hugh Kenner to read Pozzo as representing German behaviour in occupied France or as a bullying Protestant Ascendancy landlord from Ireland. Others read the two waiting figures as Jews hoping to be smuggled out of occupied France.

  Fredian readings map Didi and Gogo onto the id and ego, with the absent Godot filling the role of the superego. Jungian readings identify Lucky's torrent of speech in Act I as a manifestation of repressed unconsciousness and read Estragon's name, which sounds similar to estrogen, as linking him to the anima of Vladimir's soul. The Theatre of the Absurd reading, advanced by Martin Esslin in his 1960 book of that title, placed the play within a lineage running through the absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus and back to Soren Kierkegaard.

  Beckett's clearest statement on all of this came in his opening notes to a later work, Film, where he wrote: "No truth value attaches to the above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience." He also told critic Lawrence E. Harvey that his work does not depend on experience and is not a record of experience, and described a multiracial production at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town as making plain that elements of the play are relevant to any local situation in which one man is being exploited or oppressed by another, without the play being reducible to political allegory. That production, with its Pozzo dressed in a checked shirt and gumboots reminiscent of an Afrikaner landlord, toured internationally and reached the Old Vic Theatre in London and the Oxford Playhouse.