Word: godot
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Waiting for Godot, by 50-year-old Irish-born Samuel Beckett, who was once a sort of secretary to James Joyce, is one more of those writings that pose philosophic question marks with the emphasis of exclamation points. Like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Kafka's The Castle and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Waiting for Godot makes who's who-and sometimes what's what-a kind of guessing game...
...simple as to be almost nonexistent is Beckett's tale of two penniless, hapless, smelly tramps waiting, in a barren countryside, for a neighborhood personage named Godot. They chatter, gnaw carrots, tug at a tight shoe, talk of going separate ways and of hanging themselves, encounter a rich, unhappy magnate driving his servant before him as with whips. At the end of Act 1, a boy arrives to say that Godot cannot come that night but will the next. The next night, after further waiting and talking, a boy arrives to say that again Godot cannot come. As before...
With its lost, disconsolate, straw-clutching outcasts, its bullying and later blinded magnate, its endless rain of symbolic and allegorical smallshot, its scarred and almost sceneryless universe, Waiting for Godot can be most variously interpreted-somewhat after the fashion of the blind men and the elephant. Under Godot's metaphysical counterpane, believing Christian, doubting pessimist, left-winger and existentialist can all find reasons to nestle for warmth. But whether Godot stands for God or simply for man's unconquerable hope, whether Waiting for Godot is a philosophic depth bomb or a theatrical dud, clearly the play...
...will soon find that the city's 45 theatres are armed with a barrage of comedies, mysteries, and little else. Only one production in London's Theatre Guide has the courage to announce that it is not wholly clews or comedy. It is the current intellectual necessity, Waiting for Godot, billed as a "tragicomedy." For the rest, Britons clearly like escape quite as much as the notoriously-gross Americans. Agatha Christic's Mousctrap has baited over 1000 audiences and shows no sign of closing...
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, another philosophic piece, was touched only by tedium. The setting is a desolate swamp where for eternity two hoboes talk about how bored they are. They are waiting, as you might suspect, for Godot, a nobleman who will bring salvation from their misery. During the evening, three symbols of humanity stroll past, Godot never appears and the dialogues about boredom become more persuasive by the minute. Even allowing for the innovations in technique, I found Godot on evening of baggy-pants comedy and penny-dreadful philosophy with little power, wit, or charm...