Beckett's Waiting for Godot

En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) premiered on January 5, 1953 at the small Theatre de Babylone in Paris, directed by Roger Blin. Written by the Irish author Samuel Beckett in French, it has two acts and almost no plot. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a bare tree for a man named Godot, who never arrives. They pass the time with jokes, quarrels and games, and they are interrupted by the bullying Pozzo, his servant Lucky and a boy who brings a message.¹

Beckett had lived in France since the 1930s and assisted James Joyce. During the Second World War he joined the French Resistance and later hid in the south of France, writing the novel Watt. After the war he turned to French, partly in order to write 'without style'. He wrote Godot in 1948 and 1949 and had trouble finding a producer until Blin took it on. Beckett refused to say who or what Godot is, and critics have read the play as a statement about religion, waiting, hope, habit and the aftermath of war.

At first audiences were divided, but the play ran for months and then travelled. The English version premiered in London in 1955, and in 1957 the San Francisco Actors' Workshop performed it at San Quentin prison, where inmates understood waiting without end. The critic Martin Esslin gave the movement the name Theatre of the Absurd in 1960, including Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter. Beckett received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, and the play remains among the most staged of the twentieth century.¹