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On January 5, 1953, theatergoers in Paris sat down expecting a play and instead got a master class in… waiting. The curtain rose on Waiting for Godot, and almost immediately the show began testing everyone’s patience. Two men stand around. They talk. They argue. They wait. Nothing much happens… and that is very much the point. More than seventy years later, the play still feels oddly familiar, like being stuck in a line that never moves but pretending you’re totally fine with it!
The man responsible for this test in existential endurance was Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer living in France who had grown tired of what he considered “literary excess”. Beckett studied under James Joyce but decided to go in the opposite direction, choosing restraint over a flourishing pen and maximalism. After World War II, and after serving in the French Resistance, his outlook on the world and the literary scene darkened (and sharpened). He began writing in French instead of English simply to limit himself and “write without style”, cutting the language he used down to the bone. Waiting for Godot, written in the late 1940s, came from his desire to say less but mean more, even if what it meant was uncertainty.
The entire plot of the play, such as it is, could fit a write up on a cocktail napkin – as it is deceptively minimal. Vladimir and Estragon wait by a tree for a man named Godot. He never shows up. They pass the time with talking, arguing, joking, despairing, forgetting what they’ve said, and consider not waiting – though they never leave. Their wordplay, irritation with each other, physical comedy and philosophical musings loop back on themselves again… and again. Along the way, they meet Pozzo and his servant Lucky, a pair locked in a disturbing and absurd power dynamic whose relationship seems to mirror power structures that feel both irrational and illogical. Each act ends almost exactly where it began. The men contemplate leaving, then do not. Godot sends word that he will come tomorrow. Tomorrow never arrives.
What Beckett achieved with Waiting for Godot was nothing short of a theatrical upheaval. The play became a cornerstone of the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement that rejected the tidy plots and comforting answers of the time. Beckett showed that boredom, repetition and confusion could be meaningful dramatic tools and could, in and of themselves, make a point to viewers. Most importantly, he trusted audiences to sit with discomfort and recognize truth in it. We are all waiting for something, after all. Godot just happened to be honest enough to admit it!
The play, whose name everyone knows over seventy years later, remains famous to this day. Not because it explains anything at all, but because it refuses to. It reminds us of a universal aspect of the human condition – the habit of waiting for something… anything, really – to make sense of the time that we’re given. Happy 73rd birthday to Waiting for Godot. Word on the street is… we’re all still waiting for him to show up!
