Here are a few tentative suggestions, starting first with what we see directly in front of us: ‘A country road. A tree. A stone. Evening.’ [In Beckett’s revised text, the one adopted in this production, Estragon sits on a stone, not ‘a low mound’.]
Nothing could be less localized and less specific and, with the two human figures of Estragon and Vladimir on stage from the very beginning, more universal and more elemental indeed than ever before: ‘animal, vegetable, mineral’, commented Beckett, while directing the play himself in Berlin in 1975.
‘The play only comes to life through its contradictions, and it is the performance which can show both Pozzo’s cruelty and his tenderness, both Estragon’s truculent cynicism and his hopeless innocence, that ultimately creates an experience of emotional profundity for its audience.’
These small changes merely crystallised what is universal about the play.
And, however closely linked Estragon and Vladimir are to this elemental world – ‘Estragon is on the ground; he belongs to the stone. Vladimir is light; he is oriented towards the sky. He belongs to the tree,’ said Beckett − they remain individualized figures with features that many of us will surely recognize in ourselves or in others. They long for understanding and togetherness; yet, feeling an impulse to separate, they are almost totally dependent on each other. They have different physical or mental problems which trouble them (boots and hats, an over-active prostate or a failing memory, finding enough food to eat; even standing up or lying down is a problem) that allow us to empathize with them. They bicker and disagree, rationally and emotionally, as they wait for a key meeting that might confer some kind of meaning on their lives. In the meantime, they fill in the time as best they can, performing a set of habitual, repeated actions, exchanging the same old words, doing or saying almost anything in an effort to hold back the ‘terrible silence’ that according to Beckett is ‘waiting to pour into this play like water into a sinking ship’. Their two visitors, Pozzo and Lucky, offer a different relationship, one of master and slave, but with the master just as dependent on the slave as vice-versa. Ambiguity and uncertainty, sometimes even plain contradictions, dominate the entire play. Indeed, as the late David Bradby aptly put it, ‘the play only comes to life through its contradictions, and it is the performance which can show both Pozzo’s cruelty and his tenderness, both Estragon’s truculent cynicism and his hopeless innocence, that ultimately creates an experience of emotional profundity for its audience’.
Beckett wrote his play in the aftermath of the Second World War, a war in which he had himself been closely involved as a Resistance agent of the Special Operations Executive and been forced to escape from his home in Paris − with only a few hours to spare − after his cell, ‘Gloria SMH’, had been betrayed to the Gestapo.
The war years had revealed the concrete reality of waiting, as Beckett and Suzanne lived in their hide-out in Roussillon in the south of France. The war also showed the importance of filling in the time as they waited in what must have seemed like a painfully long dramatic pause for the nightmare to end and for their ‘real lives’ to begin again. As I wrote in my biography of Beckett, ‘he could hardly have written at that time about boots that pinch, about sleeping in a ditch but longing for a dry hay loft in which to spend the night, about wondering where the next meal is coming from – a pink radish or a carrot was indeed a treat – about appointments made and not kept without drawing on his own experiences . . . Closer to the post-war period these allusions would have been inescapable.’ Just before writing the play, he had read in two books about the appalling sufferings of his best French friend and fellow Resistance agent Alfred Péron, in Mauthausen concentration camp. Tragically, Alfred died on the march out of the camp and Beckett knew that, had he been captured, he too would have been unlikely to survive.
If we think of the graphic images of malnutrition, violence and physical suffering that we have been watching on our television screens over the past few years, it will surprise no one if these deeply embedded images echo in our minds as we watch the roped Lucky being treated so cruelly, jumping at the crack of Pozzo’s whip, fierce and reciprocated kicks being exchanged, and men scrambling desperately for some chicken bones on the stage floor. We often forget, particularly in certain ‘tamer’ productions, how violent the play is in scenes where the characters focus on their own needs, aspirations, prejudices and differences rather than on their common humanity. And yet, although Waiting for Godot clearly grew out of Beckett’s own wartime experiences, it is a play that suggests rather than states or, in his own words, ‘strives above all to avoid definition’, leaving so much to the imagination of the spectator. Gerry Dukes’ comment ‘It is what the members of the audience make of it, what they bring to it [that counts]. Waiting for Godot is the mirror of your conscience’ seems to me to hit the nail squarely on the head.
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Beckett had a huge passion for painting.
Not only did he reveal that Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon inspired the visual setting of Waiting for Godot but his theatrical images often reflect his love of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. Throughout the play, there are numerous oblique echoes of some of Beckett’s favourite paintings. The physical quarrels between Estragon, Vladimir and Lucky, so often related to the knockabout, the circus, silent screen or music-hall, are strikingly reminiscent of the brawl scenes in the paintings of Adriaen Brouwer, Peasants Fighting, for example, − ‘Brouwer, dear Brouwer’, Beckett wrote in 1937 in his diary. He was fascinated too by figures in Pieter Bruegel’s paintings and Lucky, a physical derelict, can surely be placed in a direct line of descent from one of the blind men in The Parable of the Blind, although it is, of course, Pozzo who actually goes blind in act two. Similarly, when all the characters fall over and lie with their legs outstretched on the ground, the scene bears a striking formal resemblance to Bruegel’s other painting, The Land of Cockaigne. Crucifixion images also familiar to Beckett find an oblique reflection in the visual patterning as well as being discussed in the text, as Estragon and Vladimir halt and stand one on either side of the tree, echoing the Cross (but with, of course, an absent Christ).
Images such as these can stay in one’s imagination for years.
Probably of greater importance, though, is the dark humour of the play’s dialogue. It is not at all escapist humour. It represents a kind of battening down of the hatches in a troubled world. But the script is often thought-provoking as well as comic. Finding its rhythms in Beckett’s enjoyment of quick-fire musical repartee, it reaches a depth of allusion that this almost never attained. Major philosophical problems are there but raised only fleetingly as puzzling issues that face human beings in a bewildering universe.
Within the first few minutes of the play, the multi-levelled dialogue moves from a concern with painful reality (a boot or a bladder that hurts) to deeper considerations: the uncertainty of self, for instance (Vladimir: So there you are again. / Estragon: Am I?), or the chances of salvation (Vladimir: But one of the thieves was saved . . . It’s a reasonable percentage) or of personal freedom (Estragon: We are not tied? / Vladimir: To Godot? Tied to Godot! What an idea!).
Beckett himself had a ready wit, an impressive knowledge and an acute sensitivity to pain and suffering and it is probably worth stressing how much this comes through in remarks like Vladimir’s ‘There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet’ or Pozzo’s moving (and painfully accurate!) ‘The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh’ or, probably his most memorable pronouncement: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ But Sir Peter Hall identified what for me is one of the dialogue’s most striking characteristics when he described it as ‘Poetry of the Theatre’. And if you are sensitive to music, the rhythms of the exchanges as well as the words and the stark images themselves may well remain with you for some time to come. I do hope so!
James Knowlson is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Reading. He wrote the award-winning biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) and co-edited The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. I, Waiting for Godot with a text revised by Samuel Beckett. (London: Faber and Faber, colour paperback of Beckett’s production notebook, 2019)
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is now playing at the historic Theatre Royal Haymarket for a strictly limited run. This article originally appeared in the accompanying theatre programme and has been reproduced here with kind permission.
Book tickets for the play here.
Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts by Samuel Beckett is a wonderfully surreal and thought provoking black comedy from the winner of the Nobel Prize and author of plays such as Murphy and Endgame.
