Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. (He jerks the rope.) On!
To Bath yesterday to see Peter Hall's fiftieth anniversary production of Waiting for Godot. In August 1955, he directed the English-language premiere; this production is his fourth.
Waiting for Godot hasn't dated at all. It remains a masterpiece transcending all barriers and all nationalities. And it could have been written today: there is nothing of the 50s about it. It is the start of modern drama and it gave the theatre back its metaphorical power. Godot challenged and then removed 100 years of literal naturalism where a room could only be considered a room if it was presented in full detail with the fourth wall removed. (Peter Hall, Guardian)
Peter Hall's 1997 (Old Vic) programme piece can be read here. Michael Billington's review of the current production is here:
Laurenson's Didi, with his soft Irish accent and battered topper, is a bit of a piss-elegant poseur. But there is something fiercely protective about his attitude to his lifelong partner: there is a revealing moment, at the start of the second act, when Laurenson picks up Gogo's stinking boot, sniffs it and cradles it lovingly in his arms. In sharp contrast, Dobie's white-bearded Gogo is tetchy, acerbic, scavenging and pragmatic. Yet he is unspeakably hurt at the idea that his partner survived the night without him. We all know Didi and Gogo are one of the most famous double acts in drama, but this production suggests Beckett's play is also about the asexual love that stems from shared endurance.
This was a wonderful production and Richard Dormer's Lucky was particularly outstanding: always affecting, his barely human presence was at times disturbingly raw — and a tribute, too, to the relationship he and Terence Rigby (Pozzo) created. When they reappeared in Act Two, Pozzo blind and Lucky mute, it was (again disturbingly) what Billington calls 'their fateful mutual dependence' that registered most.
John Naughton quotes Kenneth Tynan:
By all the known criteria, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a dramatic vacuum. Pity the critic who seeks a chink in its armour, for it is all chink. It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle, and no end. Unavoidably, it has a situation, and it might be accused of having suspense, since it deals with the impatience of two tramps, waiting beneath a tree for a cryptic Mr Godot to keep his appointment with them; but the situation is never developed, and a glance at the programme shows that Mr Godot is not going to arrive. Waiting for Godot frankly jettisons everything by which we recognise theatre. It arrives at the custom-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars. It does this, I believe, by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than anything in the books. A play, it asserts and proves, is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.
Simon Callow has a piece (also in the Guardian) on the play and its influence:
After 1940, his work had undergone a radical change. If he was to write about impotence and ignorance, which he now conceived to be the essential experience of human life, he must, he said, abandon rhetoric and virtuosity. The English language having a natural propensity for both of these, he abandoned it, henceforward writing in clean and analytical French, swiftly writing three great novels, Molly, Malone Dies and The Unnameable in his adopted language, each of which is in the form of a soliloquy; none of them knew any immediate success and, indeed, it was almost impossible to find publishers for them. His decision to write for the theatre was, Lawrence Graver acutely notes, a part of this stripping away: in doing so, he eliminates the voice of the narrator. …
It took two years for Blin to raise the money and get a theatre; finally, when the play opened in January 1953 at the nearly defunct Théâtre de Babylone in Montparnasse, it was greeted with a mixture of critical bewilderment, a certain amount of active audience hostility, partisan enthusiasm from some highly influential quarters (Jean Anouilh, the most successful French dramatist of the day, called it the most important theatrical premiere in 40 years) and straightforward delight from the paying audience, who attended the show in ever-growing numbers. It was word of mouth that swung it. …
There is indeed a good case for thinking of the play as a dream play in its repetitiveness, its circularity, its sudden absurdities, its arbitrariness and savage eruptions. Estragon can barely keep awake, and sleep is a blessed state because the sleeper is oblivious of life's terrible reality: "He is sleeping. He knows nothing. Let him sleep on." The characters themselves seem to shift shape oneirically: out of the blue, Vladimir becomes an eloquent philosopher, quoting Latin tags; Estragon announces that "we are not caryatids"; for no known reason Pozzo is suddenly blind, Lucky suddenly dumb. An uneasy sense of unreality pervades everything: "You're sure you saw me?" Vladimir asks the boy. "You won't come back tomorrow and say you never saw me?" Just as in Strindberg's Dream Play, where Agnes's repeated cries of "Poor, suffering mankind!" pierce the action, Didi and Gogo constantly cry out, apropos of nothing in particular, "What'll we do?! What'll we do?!" …
"I know no more about this play than anyone who just reads it attentively," Beckett wrote. "I don't know what spirit I wrote it in. I know no more about the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them . . . everything I have been able to learn, I have shown. It's not a great deal. But it's enough for me, quite enough. I'd go so far as to say that I would have been content with less . . . Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, I have only been able to know them a little, from far off, out of a need to understand them. They owe you some explanations, perhaps. Let them unravel. Without me. Them and Me, we're quits."
