House of Notes

A Play in Which Nothing Happens Twice    Translated into over a dozen languages, Waiting for Godot has been performed in little theatres and large theatres, by amateurs and professionals, on radio and television. Scarcely four decades old, Waiting for Godot has sold over a million copies in the original French and nearly that many in Beckett’s own English translation. Starring Steve Martin and Robin Williams, it was a smash hit at the Lincoln Center Theatre, with tickets available by lottery only. Quite an achievement for a comic drama in which absolutely nothing happens. (One reviewer, in fact, called it a two-act play in which nothing happens twice.) Waiting for Godot contains clowning of the highest degree, which attracts audiences, and likely the play’s enigma contributes to its appeal. Its symbolism is obscure or non- existent; its “message” is individual to each audience member, and the “nothing happens” becomes our daily existence. On a lonely country road near a tree...

Waiting for Godot: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Grave By David Kranes  Have you heard the one about the two tramps who were killing time? Or was it filling time? Is Samuel Beckett the stage poet of gloom? Or is he a baggy-pant burlesque comedian? (Bert Lahr acted in Godot; Buster Keaton in his Film.) Does the spirit involuntarily lift in the gaunt Irishman’s grove of denuded trees. . .or fall? Does the flesh fall and the voice arise? “We give birth astride the grave,” Beckett utters at one point. Some critics arm them- selves with the word birth; others with the word grave. Perhaps more of them ought to have chosen the word astride. Samuel Beckett, who always loved the shape and play of language, was fond of the epi- gram from St. Augustine: “Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.” During this past year, in response to Beckett’s 1989 death, remembrances by writers such as Mel Gussow of the New York Times stress his ...

Summary of  WAITING FOR GODOT- Samuel Becket Introduction: The  Theatre  of  Absurd  literally  means  “out  of  harmony”.  Ionesco,  who  is considered as one of the major dramatists  of the school of the absurd, defines, the ‘Absurd’ as that “which is devoid of purpose…. cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless”. In Beckett’s words, human life is the endurance and tolerance to “the boredom of living” “replaced by the suffering of being”. Samuel Beckett’s first play, Waiting for Godot (1948) written originally in French is a play in two Acts, in which two characters wait for someone named Godot, who never arrives. It does not tell a story, and it does not have a plot. Instead, it explores a static situation  where  nothing  happens,  nobody  comes  and  nobody  goes.  It  represents...

Waiting for Godot A Brief Overview Samuel Beckett – Irish – b. 1906 Waiting for Godot – 1947 - 1949 Beckett was obsessed with man-as-machine and man-as-a-user-of-machines. (Descarts idea). If man is a machine created by a perfect Being, why is that machine so defective? If man can himself create machines, does he in some way resemble the Creator of man-as-machine? What are the responsibilities of a creator toward his defective creature, and vice versa, and of one creature toward another? (Frankenstein) Most of Beckett’s characters suffer either from failure to face themselves, or from the pain that results from only half-trying. In Waiting for Godot, Didi (Vladimir) hovers on the verge of selfdiscovery but he is too terrified and so lapses into unfulfillment. Kierkegaard – “Man is paralyzed by dread. Of what? Why? Because if he breaks out of his mindlimited, objectivist way of life, the possibilities are infinite, and nothing is certain. In all crises man must act decisively. The most ...