Urbanist's Full Review: Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Most plays are not meant to be read. Especially not Beckett. Especially not famous Beckett.
I know this.
For some reason, I have a Ph.D. in theatre. This means I have read a lot of plays. So I know this. Trust me.
Most plays are not meant to be read. Especially not Beckett.
Especially not famous Beckett.
Even though the lines look really short ...
... readable ...
... even repetitive ...
... like this ...
The text of a play is a fragmentary guide to a production, which is the real work of art. Some playwrights, like Shaw, will give you SO much detail that you can experience the play almost completely by reading it, but they are the exception. Plays are meant to be seen, and if you live in any urban area of any size, SOMEONE is probably doing Waiting for Godot right now. Go see it. Even a weak production will give you a stronger sense of this play than reading the text will do. This play, in particular, is one that "plays itself." You can produce it badly and still, somehow, it works.
If you must read this play, follow its cues to stop and visualize. When you open the book and see
A country road. A tree.
Evening.
... stop, breathe, and see that for yourself, whatever that brings to mind for you. THEN turn the page.
People are talking. Don't read, LISTEN. Hear the voices. Estragon and Vladimir may look like twins, especially when they call each other "Gogo" and "Didi", but they're different. Crucially. If you can't sense a difference, make up one. Hear them in the voices of any two men you know -- gradually, the real characters will emerge for you.
If you go see this play, of course, the visualizing will be done for you. Even if it's done badly, you're likely to find the play easier to experience. I'm eternally grateful that I saw this play before reading it, even though I would later have to read it endlessly. That first production will always anchor the play in my memory as something I sensed, felt, experienced, rather than read.
Waiting for Godot is impossible to review for Epinions in the conventional sense, just as it would be absurd to review King Lear. This play has so fully permeated contemporary theatre that it's just part of the landscape, a fixture of the literary world. Whether we recognize it or not, this play wrote a new language in which drama now speaks. Even if you see the latest "Guys and Dolls" on Broadway, Beckett's influence will be there, somewhere ...
The plot has been been aptly summarized in three words: "Nothing happens, twice." But this play is not about plot. It's about absence (one of its many links to King Lear, in fact). It is a perfectly shaped emptiness that draws you in, searching. People continue to argue over this "nothing," and theatres continue to produce it, because like Shakespeare, Beckett caught something universal here and presented it unadorned, so that it transcends centuries and continents. Set this play in ancient Rome or on Alpha Centauri VII. Make the solitary tree an oak, a eucalypt, a palm or a flagpole. Cast women as the two leads (contrary to Beckett's opinion) instead of men. It still works.
If this play haunts you as effectively as it haunts the rest of contemporary drama, then go find the later plays. Waiting for Godot may seem stripped down, but Beckett kept stripping, kept throwing out detail and reaching for essences. Skip Endgame (after reading my review of it, of course) and discover the late plays, which are easiest to find in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. By the end of his career, Beckett was capturing the essence of Waiting for Godot in plays that are less than ten minutes long. These, alas, have to be read, because they are so rarely produced. But read with your eyes closed, so to speak, so that, like the blind Gloucester in Lear, you can really see.
The textbook, En Attendant Waiting for Godot, by Beckett, available in Hardback. Published by: Perseus Distribution. Edition: . ISBN10: 080211821...More at Textbooks.com
Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the 20th century, was born on 13 April 1906. He died i...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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