Waiting for Godot

Overview

About a hundred and ten pages, written by Samuel Beckett in French between 1948 and 1949, under the title En attendant Godot, and first performed in Paris in January 1953 at the small Théâtre de Babylone, in a production that, against most expectations, became a genuine sensation and established Beckett’s international reputation almost overnight. Beckett, an Irishman who had lived in Paris for most of his adult life and had worked as a young man as James Joyce’s secretary, translated the play into English himself, and the English version, first performed in London in 1955, is generally the text taught and performed in English-speaking theater.

The play’s original subtitle, a tragicomedy in two acts, signals its deliberate refusal to sit comfortably in either category, and it became, almost immediately, the founding and defining example of what the critic Martin Esslin would soon after name the Theatre of the Absurd, a loose grouping of mid-century playwrights, including Ionesco and later Pinter, whose work abandoned conventional plot, coherent character development and resolvable conflict in favor of dramatizing directly, in form as well as content, a world that had lost confidence in any larger meaning or purpose organizing human existence.

The play is famously, and accurately, summarized by the critic Vincent Canby’s much-quoted line that it is a play in which nothing happens, twice, a description Beckett himself would likely not have disputed, since the deliberate absence of conventional dramatic action, replaced by waiting, routine and repetition, is precisely the point rather than an accidental failure of plot.

What happens

Act I. Two tramps, Vladimir, called Didi, and Estragon, called Gogo, meet by a bare tree on a country road, as they apparently do every day, waiting for a man named Godot, whom neither of them seems entirely certain they have ever actually met or made a definite appointment with. They pass the time in a series of routines: struggling with Estragon’s boot, which will not come off; trading half-remembered fragments of the Gospel story of the two thieves crucified alongside Christ; considering, more than once, whether to hang themselves from the tree, an idea they raise and drop with unsettling casualness; and repeatedly, exhaustedly, returning to the fact that they are waiting for Godot and cannot leave until he comes.

They are interrupted by the arrival of Pozzo, an imperious, bullying landowner, leading Lucky, his servant, on a long rope around the neck, weighed down with heavy luggage. Pozzo treats Lucky with casual, almost theatrical cruelty, and, at Pozzo’s command, Lucky delivers an extraordinary, nearly unbroken torrent of increasingly incoherent academic-sounding speech, a parody of philosophical and theological jargon collapsing under its own accumulated weight, before the other characters physically wrestle him into silence.

After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy arrives with a message: Mr. Godot will not come this evening, but will surely come tomorrow. Vladimir and Estragon consider leaving and, in the act’s final, famous stage direction, agree that they should go, and do not move.

Act II. The next day, or perhaps a considerably later day, the situation repeats with pointed variations. The tree, bare in Act I, now has a few leaves. Vladimir and Estragon go through many of the same routines, with small, telling differences and increasing signs of confusion about whether they have genuinely been through all this before or whether memory itself is failing them.

Pozzo and Lucky return, radically changed: Pozzo is now blind and cannot recall having met Vladimir and Estragon the day before, and Lucky is now mute, the earlier torrent of speech gone entirely, with no explanation offered for either deterioration. Pozzo’s blindness produces one of the play’s most quoted speeches, delivered with sudden, genuine intensity, about the brevity and meaninglessness of a human life measured against the vastness of time, that people are born astride a grave and the light lasts only an instant before darkness returns.

The boy returns again, delivering essentially the same message as before, that Godot will not come today but will come tomorrow, seeming, when questioned, either not to remember the previous day’s identical visit or to be, possibly, an entirely different boy performing the same role. Vladimir and Estragon again consider suicide, again discuss leaving, and the play ends with the identical exchange and identical stage direction that closed the first act: they agree to go, and they do not move.

How to read it or see it

Read it, if you can, alongside watching a performance or a recorded production. Beckett’s precise, almost musical stage directions, specifying exact pauses, silences and physical business, are doing enormous dramatic work that a purely textual reading can undersell, and the play’s rhythm depends heavily on timing that only performance fully reveals.

Resist the temptation to identify Godot with a single stable meaning. Beckett himself, asked directly whether Godot represents God, repeatedly declined to confirm or deny it, and the play’s power depends substantially on keeping this question genuinely open rather than settling it, since a Godot definitively revealed as God, or definitively revealed as anything else specific, would close off exactly the uncertainty the play is built around.

Pay close attention to the repetitions and their variations between the two acts. The tree gaining leaves, Pozzo’s blindness, Lucky’s silence, the boy’s uncertain memory: these are not simple repetition but repetition with deterioration, and tracking exactly what changes and what does not is central to understanding what, if anything, the play thinks time is actually doing to its characters.

Notice how much of the dialogue is explicitly, self-consciously about filling time. The characters frequently comment directly on their own need to keep talking, to keep finding something to do, in terms that make the play’s method visible within the play itself, a kind of built-in commentary on its own technique.

Take the final stage direction in both acts seriously as the play’s most important single image. They agree to go and do not move: whether this represents tragic paralysis, comic futility, or something closer to stubborn, meaningless endurance is a question the play deliberately leaves for the audience to sit with rather than resolving.

Read or watch Beckett’s own later, even more stripped-down play Endgame afterward, to see him push the same basic dramatic strategy, characters trapped in routines, waiting, unable to leave, even further toward theatrical minimalism.

Questions it raises

• Is waiting for Godot an act of faith, a form of paralysis, or something the play refuses to let you decide is either one cleanly?
• Vladimir and Estragon are, in principle, free to leave the tree at any time. What, precisely, keeps them from actually doing so?
• Does it matter whether Godot ever intended to come, or whether he exists at all, given how completely the waiting itself has organized the characters’ lives regardless of the answer?
• Pozzo and Lucky deteriorate drastically between the two acts with no explanation offered. What is the play suggesting about time, cause and suffering by refusing to explain this change?
• The play is famous for being about nothing happening, twice. What, if anything, does happen, even within that apparent absence of conventional plot?
• The final identical stage direction closes both acts. Is repeating it exactly, rather than varying it, itself doing something the varied repetitions elsewhere in the play are not?