Waiting For Godot
Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's premiere. Voted "the most significant English language play of the 20th century", Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French version, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only), "a tragicomedy in two acts". The original French text was written "between 9th October 1948 and 29th January 1949 after Molloy and Malone Meurt but before L’Innommable." The premiere was on the 23 January 1953 in the Théâtre de Babylone with Roger Blin as the director who also played Pozzo.
Plot synopsis
Act I
Waiting for Godot follows two consecutive days in the lives of a pair of men who divert themselves while they wait expectantly and unsuccessfully for someone named Godot to arrive.
They claim him an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognise him were they to see him. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide — anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay". "Silence," says Beckett, "is pouring into this play like water into a sinking ship", arguably both true and ironic, given the play's wordy banter and patter.
The play opens with the character Estragon struggling to remove his boot from his foot.
Estragon eventually gives up, muttering, "Nothing to be done." His friend Vladimir takes up the thought and muses on it, the implication being that nothing is a thing that has to be done and this pair is going to have to spend the rest of the play doing it. When Estragon finally succeeds in removing his boot, he looks and feels inside but finds nothing. The motif recurs throughout in the play.
The pair discusses repentance, particularly in relation to the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus, and the fact that only one of the four Evangelists mentions that one of them was saved.
This is the first of numerous Biblical references in the play, which may be linked to its putative central theme of the search for and reconciliation with God, as well as salvation: "We're saved!" they cry on more than one occasion when they feel that Godot may be near.
Presently, Vladimir expresses his frustration with Estragon's limited conversational skills: "Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can't you, once in a way?". Estragon struggles in this regard throughout the play, and Vladimir generally takes the lead in their dialogue and encounters with others.
Vladimir is at times hostile towards his companion, but in general they are close, frequently embracing and supporting one another.
Estragon peers out into the audience and comments on the bleakness of his surroundings. He wants to depart but is told that they cannot because they must wait for Godot.
Throughout the play, experienced time is attenuated, fractured or eerily non-existent. The only thing that they are fairly sure about is that they are to meet at a tree: there is one nearby.
Estragon dozes off, but Vladimir is not interested in hearing about his dream after rousing him. Estragon wants to hear an old joke about a brothel, which Vladimir starts but cannot finish, as he is suddenly compelled to rush off and urinate.
Estragon suggests that they hang themselves, the idea being that this may give them erections, but they quickly abandon the idea when it seems that they might not both die: this would leave one of them alone, an intolerable notion. They decide to do nothing: "It's safer," explains Estragon, before asking what Godot is going to do for them when he arrives.
The diversion ends as it began, Estragon announcing that they still have nothing to do.
Their waiting is interrupted by the passing through of Pozzo and his heavily-laden slave Lucky, who may, according to Beckett, "shatter the space of the play". Pozzo and Lucky have been seen to represent a sort of double of Vladimir and Estragon, with similar roles, anxieties and incertitudes. At one point, Vladimir observes that they are "tied to Godot" as Lucky is tied to Pozzo.
Vladimir also refers to Estragon as a "pig" several times later in the play, echoing Pozzo's abuse of Lucky.
"A terrible cry" from the wings heralds the initial entrance of Lucky, who has a rope tied around his neck. He crosses half the stage before his master appears holding the other end.
Pozzo barks orders at his slave and frequently calls him a "pig", but is civil towards the other two. They mistake him at first for Godot and clearly do not recognise him for the self-proclaimed personage he is.
This irks him, but, while maintaining that the land that they are on is his, he acknowledges that "he road is free to all".
Deciding to rest for a while, Pozzo enjoys a pre-packed meal of chicken and wine. Finished, he casts the bones aside, and Estragon jumps at the chance to ask for them, much to Vladimir's embarrassment, but is told that they belong to the carrier.
Taking this as a "no", Estragon claims the bones.
Vladimir takes Pozzo to task regarding his mistreatment of his slave, but his protestations are ignored. Estragon tries to ask for some money, but Vladimir cuts him short, explaining that they are not beggars.
These words, although crude, describe normal human functions, which in some ways bring the discourse "down to earth". They also, however, represent or indicate a disordered and disintegrating mind, one perhaps disturbed by too much waiting.
Some other unusual words include "apathia", which is synonymous with "apathy"; "aphasia", the loss of ability to understand or to express speech owing to brain damage; and "athambia", the meaning of which has been subject to debate, but which may be broadly interpreted, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as "imperturbability". The implication may be that God is unfeeling, unseeing and inattentive. Also repeated is the word "quaquaqua", which may simply be meaningless sound, but which is similar to "quaquaversal", which means "pointing in every direction", appropriate to Lucky's roundabout discourse.
Broadly speaking, Lucky's speech falls into four gambits: "the first describes an impersonal and callous God, the second asserts that man 'wastes and pines', the third mourns an inhospitable earth and the last attempts to draw the threads of the speech together by claiming that man diminishes in a world that does not nurture him." It may be summarized as follows:
cknowledging the existence of a personal God, one who exists outside time and who loves us dearly and who suffers with those who are plunged into torment, it is established beyond all doubt that man for reasons unknown, has left his labours, abandoned, unfinished.
Once Lucky has been revived, Pozzo has him pack up his things and, together, they leave.
At the end of the act (and its successor), a boy arrives, purporting to be a messenger sent from Godot, to advise the pair that he will not be coming that "evening but surely tomorrow." During Vladimir's interrogation of the boy, he asks if he came the day before, making it apparent that the two men have been waiting for an indefinite period and will likely continue to wait ad infinitum. After the boy departs, they decide to leave but make no attempt to do so, an action repeated in Act II, as the curtain is drawn.
Act II
Act II opens with Vladimir singing a round about a dog which serves to illustrate the cyclical nature of the play’s universe, and also points toward the play's debt to the carnivalesque, music hall traditions and vaudeville comedy (this is only one of a number of canine references and allusions in the play).
He begins to see that although there is notional evidence of linear progression, basically he is living the same day over and over. Vladimir tries to talk to him about what appears to be a seasonal change in the tree and the proceedings of the day before, but he has only a vague recollection.
Vladimir realizes here an opportunity to produce tangible evidence of the previous day's events. He opts for the radish but it is black and he hands it back.
Vladimir sings him a lullaby.
Vladimir notices Lucky’s hat, and he decides to try it on. This leads to a frenetic hat swapping scene (which was mimicked by Harold Pinter in The Caretaker).
Estragon sees an opportunity to extort more food or to exact revenge on Lucky for kicking him. Eventually though, they all find their way onto their feet.
Whereas the Pozzo in Act I is a windbag, since he has become blind he appears to have gained some insight.
The same boy returns to inform them not to expect Godot today, but he would arrive the next day. Estragon's trousers fall down, but he doesn’t notice till Vladimir tells him to pull them up.
He once recalled them when Sir Ralph Richardson “wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae, and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending to illustrate the part of Vladimir … I told him that 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.”
Vladimir and Estragon
When Beckett started writing he did not have a visual image of Vladimir and Estragon. They have been together for fifty years but when asked – by Pozzo – they don’t reveal their actual ages.
Vladimir stands through most of the play whereas Estragon sits down numerous times and even dozes off.
He finds it hard to remember but can recall certain things when prompted, e.g. So I said, ‘That sounds exactly what I need.’” “Sam and Roger were not entirely convinced by my interpretation but had no objections.” When he explained to Beckett that he was playing Lucky as if he were suffering from Parkinson’s, Beckett said, “‘Yes, of course.’ He mentioned briefly that his mother had had Parkinson’s, but quickly moved on to another subject.”
“When Beckett was asked why Lucky was so named, he replied, “I suppose he is lucky to have no more expectations…”
Although it has been contended that "Pozzo and Lucky are simply Didi and Gogo writ large" there is a different kind of dynamic at work here.
Pozzo may be mistaken for Godot by the two men but, as far as Lucky goes, Pozzo is his Godot, another way in which he is lucky. This is the explanation he has given most often.”
“Beckett said to Peter Woodthorpe that he regretted calling the absent character ‘Godot’, because of all the theories involving God to which this had given rise. “I also told Richardson that if by Godot I had meant God I would said God, and not Godot.
Of the two thieves crucified along with Jesus only one was saved, of the two boys who work for Godot only one appears safe from beatings, “Beckett said, only half-jokingly, that one of Estragon’s feet was saved”; it is perhaps better for the pair of them that he does not come.
The name "Godot" is pronounced in Britain and Ireland with the emphasis on the first syllable (i.e. The minimal description calls to mind “the idea of the ‘lieu vague’, a location which should not be particularised”.
Alan Schneider once suggested putting the play on in a round – Pozzo has often been commented on as a ringmaster – but Beckett dissuaded him: “I don’t in my ignorance agree with the round and feel Godot needs a very closed box.” He once even contemplated at one point have “faint shadow of bars on stage floor” but, in the end, decided against this level of what he called “explicitation”.
Yet the illusion of faith--that deeply embedded hope that Godot might come--still flickers in the minds of Vladimir and Estragon. What such a reaction showed, however, was that, although the play can in no way be taken as a political allegory, there are elements that are relevant to any local situation in which one man is being exploited or oppressed by another.”
Other interpretations abound.
Political: “It was seen as an allegory of the cold war,” or of French resistance to the Germans.
Graham Hassell writes, “he intrusion of Pozzo and Lucky … seems like nothing more than a metaphor for Ireland's view of mainland Britain, where society has ever been blighted by a greedy ruling élite keeping the working classes passive and ignorant by whatever means.” The pair are often played with Irish accents, an inevitable consequence, some feel, of Beckett's rhythms and phraseology, but this is not stipulated in the text.
Freudian: “Bernard Dukore develops a triadic theory in Didi, Gogo and the absent Godot, based on Freud’s trinitarian description of the psyche in The Ego and the Id (1923) and the usage of onomastic techniques. Dukore finally sees Beckett’s play as a metaphor for the futility of man’s existence when salvation is expected from an external entity, and the self is denied introspection.”
Jungian: “The four archetypal personalities or the four aspects of the soul are grouped in two pairs: the ego and the shadow, the persona and the soul’s image (animus or anima).
Vladimir appears as the complementary masculine principle, or perhaps the rational persona of the contemplative type.”
Existentialist: Broadly speaking existentialists hold there are certain questions that everyone must deal with (if they are to take human life seriously), questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence. He is by turns dismissed, satirised, or ignored, but he, and his tortured son, are never definitively discarded.”
Biographical: It has been called a “metaphor for the long walk into Roussillon, when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks … during the day and walked by night … of the relationship of Beckett to Joyce.” The earliest drafts contained significant personal references but these were later excised.
Homoerotic: That the play calls for only male actors and barely references women at all has caused some to look upon Vladimir and Estragon’s relationship as quasi-marital: “they bicker, they embrace each other, they depend upon each other … they might be thought of as a married couple.”
Compassion as the ultimate purpose of Man: All pairs in the play exercise lack of compassion, sometimes brutally as when the main characters seek to kick instead of help Pozzo calling out piteously for pity over and over again; always looking at the advantage to themselves.
But the issue of gender seemed to him to be so vital a distinction for a playwright to make that he reacted angrily, instituting a ban on all productions of his plays in The Netherlands.” In 1991 “Judge Huguette Le Foyer de Costil ruled that the production would not cause excessive damage to Beckett's legacy” and the play was performed by the all-female cast of the Brut de Beton Theater Company at the prestigious Avignon Festival. The Italian Pontedera Theatre Foundation won a similar claim in 2006 when they replaced Vladimir and Estragon with two female actors albeit playing the roles as males. A 2001 production at Indiana University staged the play with women playing Pozzo and the Boy.
History
Poster for a 2003 production of Waiting for Godot
“t was Beckett’s escape from the increasingly despotic interiority of the fictional trilogy; in Beckett’s own phrasing, ‘I began to write Godot as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time.’” It was inspired, according to Beckett himself, by a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Ruby Cohn recalls seeing the painting, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon of 1824, along with Beckett who “announced unequivocally, ‘This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know.’” “He may well have confused two paintings since, at other times, he drew the attention of friends to Two Men Contemplating the Moon from 1819, in which two men dressed in cloaks and viewed from the rear are looking at a full moon framed by the black branches of a large, leafless tree.” In either case both paintings are similar enough that what he attested to could apply equally to either.
Beckett admitted such in a New York Post interview by Jerry Tallmer .
“n 17th February 1952 … an abridged version of the play was performed in the studio of the Club d’Essai de la Radio and was broadcast on radio … lthough he sent a polite note that Roger Blin read out, Beckett himself did not turn up.” Part of his introduction reads:
I don’t know who Godot is. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin.
Some, like Vladimir’s inability to remember the farmer’s name (Bonnelly), show how the translation became more indefinite, attrition and loss of memory more pronounced.” A number of biographical details were removed, all adding to a general “vaguening” of the text which he continued to trim for the rest of his life.
In the nineteen-fifties, theatre was strictly censored in the UK, to Beckett's amazement since he thought it a bastion of free speech. He said 'I ain't waiting for Richard,' grabbed a roll and left.