Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot is one of the landmark texts of the absurdist theatre movement, first performed in 1955, written by philosopher and writer Samuel Beckett. The plot is fundamentally uneventful and consists of two unknown people waiting for another unknown thing. Despite the seeming lack of action, this play provokes deep, existential thought that not many others achieve.

In this play, Estragon and Vladimir wait for a man named Godot, and have been doing so for at least half a century. We don't know where they are, who they are, when they are, or anything about their backgrounds. A character named Pozzo later enters with a slave Lucky providing some slapstick comic relief and questioning. Later a Boy arrives to apologise for Godot's absence, but soon leaves. They sleep, and in the second act essentially the same events are repeated. Estragon is mostly the happier character, thinking less and speaking bluntly but at times with even more profound philosophical meaning. He looks up to Vladimir in a way but is largely unbothered. Vladimir, however is the sad and curious stock character, and the one who wants to keep on waiting for Godot, despite Estragon's boredom and never-executed threats to leave. Vladimir secretly relies greatly on him when he is gone but acts quite indifferently towards him when he is on stage. Whereas Vladimir tries to make sense of his situation (struggling against the absurdity of his existence and seeking meaning), Estragon is quite happy to relax and is very forgetful, unable to remember who it is that beats him up every night before sleep.

The entire plot is an existential conundrum - the thing they are waiting for that never arrives paradoxically gives Vladimir purpose (although Estragon is far less concerned) and the whole play is full of similar circular reasoning like this.

"Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot."

Samuel Beckett, as well as the rest of this genre, was inspired by different philosophies and people. Camus, Rene Descartes, his pupil Arnold Geulincx, Italian poet Dante and James Joyce, with ideas of absurdism, existentialism and idealism all influenced him. Most of his work was concerned with human beings in extreme conditions that studied the fundamental human condition - everything else was superficially masking the basic problems with the human condition, and asks how we should deal with existence - how we react to being thrown into life? Most of his plays therefore involve stripping back to the bare minimum and abstracted state to study human existence. Beckett disliked shallow objectives and wanted to search deeper. Does the hero, having saved the day and won his lady, really live happily ever after? Texts like Waiting for Godot answers this. Furthermore, he struggled with the sense of self, and how to define it, ideas stemming for Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum."

Beckett was primarily a linguist and studied multiple languages. His plays however show a break down of language with the undeveloped characters and sparse action, and the silence that covers lots of the play causes an uneven tempo synonymous with absurd theatre to this day. This effect was exaggerated by the constant changing of objectives and ideas of the characters in a world of boredom, creating an even more uneven rhythm to the piece as well as humour and absurdity. This is also contrasted to fast stychomythic dialogue at points which creates intrigue. Fundamentally Beckett was also a comic writer - Waiting for Godot is full of black humour about the character's existence that makes light of the situation, although Beckett didn't see much difference between laughing and crying. He also included copious amounts of stage directions as he was interested in the physicality of the characters and coordinating movement clearly in a world where not much of this happens.

Finally, Beckett was notoriously mysterious about his works, and told critics little. Some have interpreted the two characters as old friends, as two homeless people, and even the Ego and Id of Sigmund Freud's pyschoanalysis. Beckett said, "All I am sure of is that the two men are wearing bowler hats." I believe that searching for meaning in an absurd piece designed to show the inherent meaningless of the universe is completely ridiculous - this abstract scene is not meant to represent any one place, or time, or theme. Critics searching for this have missed Beckett's genius.

We can interpret what some of the other characters represent however, as the Boy and Godot are reminiscent of other meanings people find in life - religion, work, materialism, amongst others. The boy asks for the two to keep faith in Godot, and that he is coming (like a priest of Christianity spreading religion and promising meaning to those who have faith). Pozzo and Lucky have a strange master servant relationship and provoke questions of the two. They also believe Pozzo is Godot at first but is found out not to be and is an underwhelming reminder of a strange system of status within the play. The themes of this play are purely fundamental - time, life and death, suffering, boredom, companionship, status, religion, the human condition, and mainly absurdism.

For this extract we will be using Peter Brook as our practitioner, who was famous for his minimalist set design and natural theatre that could happen in any "empty space," and focused on the audience imagination to create interest. 

During rehearsals, after practitioner research and practical experience (from Brook and similarly Grotowski), we began reading the scene (Pages 62-70 in Act 2) and analysing the characters, as well as the meaning of the play and what we wanted to portray. Alongside multiple improvisation exercises that emphasise the organic theatre Brook enjoyed, we used the Meisner technique to think about the different objectives of our characters on each line by focusing on intonation and vocal expression, before moving onto physicality.