Word: godot
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Cunning Anthology. Words without plot. They are drawn from Malone Dies and Malloy, from Watt, Embers, Krapp's Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, but no seams show. There is an incident with a white horse, another with a girl, both long ago. There is an anecdote about two old men, deep trouble, silent snowy night, also long ago. The present, for Beckett's tramp, seems a stretch of shingle beach, or a corner in Caliban's cell. There is an outrageously shaggy story about the arrangement of 16 pebbles in four pockets, which grows with...
...Next Time might best be titled Weding for Waiting for Godot. Whereas in Beeken's master-piece we live through the plight of human beings waiting for that never-to-arrive something that will make sense of it all, in Saunders' play we merely hear the playwright's mouthpieces talk about waiting for that something. Beckett did not explain: he showed he dramatized. (There is a lot of truth to the old cliche that the silences are as important as any of the lines in Godot. ) Saunders merely feeds us truisms like "The point is that he existed...
...DIRECTOR BOORSTIN. my heart goes out. He has ransacked his highly fertile comic imagination to give the work life, and his failure reflects not a bit on his ample theatrical skills. His staging is sprinkled with Godot -like schtick and much of it is amusing. I also liked some tricks he did with recorded music and the stage itself during the show's first moments...
...alienation of affections in a headline scandal. He marries her, has two kids, continues as a Broadway star, gets on TIME'S cover but can't make it really big in radio, TV or movies (except for Oz). He wins a huge artistic success in Waiting for Godot as his stage career dims, and finally -oh, irony-makes the biggest money of his life ($75,000 a year) pushing Lay's Potato Chips on TV commercials. Until at final fadeout with cancer (his hypochondriac nightmare come true), nurse bends over and sees him inaudibly whispering...
...conventions he is parodying. In one disarming aside to the reader, Fowles argues that the Victorian novelist, aided by his assumed omniscience, patted life into artificial patterns and robbed characters of reality. While the Victorians believed that "the novelist stands next to God," Fowles takes his stand next to Godot. He proclaims that the novelist's first principle is the "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist," namely those of his characters. To illustrate the point, he twice ties up his narrative strands in tidy traditional endings, then backs up and unwinds them again in tangled, less conclusive...