Dramatic Works
Waiting for Godot
So much has been written about this play over the past quarter-century that one is tempted to add no further to the elucidation, or confusion. There are almost as many interpretations, both specific and general, as there are critics and commentators, but my advice is simply to sit forward and enjoy.
As for the facts: Waiting for Godot was written in 1948, directly in French. In date of composition, it falls between Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Beckett turned to drama to “get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time,” as he confessed.
Though Beckett’s first professionally produced play, Godot was far from his first foray into the realm of drama. In 1931 he had written a parody of Comeille’s Le Cid entitled Le Kid; a few years later he labored over a dramatic work based on the life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, which he abandoned when he decided that he couldn’t get the right voice. In 1946 he wrote Mercier and Camier, which, though a novel, embodied much of the situation and dramatic wordplay later to manifest itself in Godot. The following year he composed another play, this one three hours in length, entitled Eleuthéria, the Greek word for “freedom,” which Beckett has carefully kept from being either performed or published. The point is, by the time he wrote Godot, he had already had considerable experience with the dramatic form.
Waiting for Godot had its world première on January 5, 1953, in the tiny Left Bank Théâtre de Baby lone in Paris, in Roger Blin’s direction. Because it seems so seminal a work of the contemporary theater, one often assumes that it was an immediate success. Having been at one of the early performances, I can vouch for the fact that, however it might have moved me, it did not exactly take Paris by storm. The night I went, perhaps two or three weeks after the opening, the house was barely half full. The laughter was hesitant, the applause more polite than heartfelt. But by slow degrees that ultimate critic, word-of-mouth, went to work, and before very long Godot had become the talk of Paris. As productions spread across the globe, reactions were varied, but the very controversy generated by the play tended to assure its “success.” Detractors called it everything from “boring” to “Communist” to “existential” (the ultimate insult). Its partisans needed no epithets or labels; they sensed they had been privileged to witness a work of greatness. Rarely has a play labeled “avant-garde” become so quickly a “classic”; and yet, like all true “classics,” Godot can still today provoke controversy.
Whether it is Beckett’s greatest work of drama remains for history to determine. Unquestionably, however, it was a work which captured the imagination of the time—and perhaps all time. Though the battle of interpretation still rages around it today, Waiting for Godot has already become part of theater history-
Waiting for Godot
A tragicomedy in 2 acts
WAITING FOR GODOT was first presented (as En Attendant Godot) at the Théâtre de Babylone, 38 Boulevard Raspail, Paris, France, during the season of 1952-3. The play was directed by Roger Blin, with décor by Sergio Gerstein. The cast was as follows:
ESTRAGON
Pierre Latour
VLADIMIR
Lucien Raimbourg
POZZO
Roger Blin
LUCKY
Jean Martin
A BOY
Serge Lecointe
Act I
A country road. A tree.
Evening.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Vladimir.
ESTRAGON:
(giving up again). Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR:
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.
ESTRAGON:
Am I?
VLADIMIR:
I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone for ever.
ESTRAGON:
Me too.
VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! Well have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.
VLADIMIR:
(hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON:
In a ditch.
VLADIMIR:
(admiringly). A ditch! Where?
ESTRAGON:
(without gesture). Over there.
VLADIMIR:
And they didn’t beat you?
ESTRAGON:
Beat me? Certainly they beat me.
VLADIMIR:
The same lot as usual?
ESTRAGON:
The same? I don t know.
VLADIMIR:
When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.
ESTRAGON:
And what of it?
VLADIMIR:
(gloomily). It’s too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.
ESTRAGON:
Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.
VLADIMIR:
Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it’s too late. They wouldn’t even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing?
ESTRAGON:
Taking off my boot. Did that never happen to you?
VLADIMIR:
Boots must be taken off every day, I’m tired telling you that. Why don’t you listen to me?
ESTRAGON:
(feebly). Help me!
VLADIMIR:
It hurts?
ESTRAGON:
(angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
VLADIMIR:
(angrily). No one ever suffers but you. I don’t count. I’d like to hear what you’d say if you had what I have.
ESTRAGON:
It hurts?
VLADIMIR:
(angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
ESTRAGON:
(pointing). You might button it all the same.
VLADIMIR:
(stooping). True. (He buttons his fly.) Never neglect the little things of life.
ESTRAGON:
What do you expect, you always wait till the last moment.
VLADIMIR:
(musingly). The last moment . . . (He meditates.) Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?
ESTRAGON:
Why don’t you help me?
VLADIMIR:
Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go
all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it,
feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.)
How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time
. . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled.
(With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes
off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He
knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a
foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.)
Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme
effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He peers
inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside
down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if
anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside
it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well?
ESTRAGON:
Nothing.
VLADIMIR:
Show.
> ESTRAGON:
There’s nothing to show.
VLADIMIR:
Try and put it on again.
ESTRAGON:
(examining his foot). I’ll air it for a bit.
VLADIMIR:
There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots
the faults of his feet. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the
crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) This is
getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in
thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the
thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable
percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.
ESTRAGON:
What?
VLADIMIR:
Suppose we repented.
ESTRAGON:
Repented what?
VLADIMIR:
Oh . . . (He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
ESTRAGON:
Our being born?
Vladimir breaks into a hearty laugh which he immediately stifles, his hand pressed to his pubis, his face contorted.
VLADIMIR:
One daren’t even laugh any more.
ESTRAGON:
Dreadful privation.
VLADIMIR:
Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It’s not the same thing. Nothing to be done. (Pause.) Gogo.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). What is it?
VLADIMIR:
Did you ever read the Bible?
ESTRAGON:
The Bible . . . (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it
VLADIMIR:
Do you remember the Gospels?
ESTRAGON:
I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where well go, I used to say, that’s where well go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.
VLADIMIR:
You should have been a poet.
ESTRAGON:
I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
Where was I . . . How’s your foot?
ESTRAGON:
Swelling visibly.
VLADIMIR:
Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story?
ESTRAGON:
No.
VLADIMIR:
Shall I tell it to you?
ESTRAGON:
No.
VLADIMIR:
It’ll pass the time. (Pause.) Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One—
ESTRAGON:
Our what?
VLADIMIR:
Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other . . . (he searches for the contrary of saved) . . . damned.
ESTRAGON:
Saved from what?
VLADIMIR:
Hell.
ESTRAGON:
I’m going.
He does not move.
VLADIMIR:
And yet . . . (pause) . . . how is it—this is not boring you I hope—how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there—or thereabouts—and only one speaks of a thief being saved. (Pause.) Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?
ESTRAGON:
(with exaggerated enthusiasm). I find this really most extraordinarily interesting.
VLADIMIR:
One out of four. Of the other three two don’t mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him.
ESTRAGON
Who?
VLADIMIR:
What?
ESTRAGON:
What’s all this about? Abused who?
VLADIMIR:
The Saviour.
ESTRAGON:
Why?
VLADIMIR:
Because he wouldn’t save them.
ESTRAGON:
From hell?
VLADIMIR:
Imbecile! From death.
ESTRAGON:
I thought you said hell.
VLADIMIR:
From death, from death.
ESTRAGON:
Well what of it?
VLADIMIR:
Then the two of them must have been damned.
ESTRAGON:
And why not?
VLADIMIR:
But one of the four says that one of the two was saved.
ESTRAGON:
Well? They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it.
VLADIMIR:
But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?
ESTRAGON:
Who believes him?
VLADIMIR:
Everybody. It’s the only version they know.
ESTRAGON:
People are bloody ignorant apes.
He rises painfully, goes limping to extreme left, halts, gazes into distance off with his hand screening his eyes, turns, goes to extreme right, gazes into distance. Vladimir watches him, then goes and picks up the boot, peers into it, drops it hastily.
VLADIMIR:
Pah!
He spits. Estragon moves to center, halts with his back to auditorium.
ESTRAGON:
Charming spot. (He turns, advances to front, halts facing auditorium.) Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let’s go.
VLADIMIR:
We can’t.
ESTRAGON:
Why not?
VLADIMIR:
We’re waiting for Godot.
ESTRAGON:
(despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here?
VLADIMIR:
What?
ESTRAGON:
That we were to wait.
VLADIMIR:
He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others.
ESTRAGON:
What is it?
VLADIMIR:
I don’t know. A willow.
ESTRAGON:
Where are the leaves?
VLADIMIR:
It must be dead.
ESTRAGON:
No more weeping.
VLADIMIR:
Or perhaps it’s not the season.
ESTRAGON:
Looks to me more like a bush.
VLADIMIR:
A shrub.
ESTRAGON:
A bush.
VLADIMIR:
A—. What are you insinuating? That we’ve come to the wrong place?
ESTRAGON:
He should be here.
VLADIMIR:
He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
ESTRAGON:
And if he doesn’t come?
VLADIMIR:
We’ll come back to-morrow.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on Page 25