He was born in Foxrock, a respectable suburb of Dublin, to Protestant Anglo-Irish parents. Like his fellow countryman and mentor Joyce, Beckett oriented himself in exile from his native Ireland, but unlike Joyce, who managed to remain relatively safe on the fringes of a modern world spinning out of control, Beckett was very much plunged into the maelstrom. From its initial baffling premiere, Waiting for Godot would be seen, it is estimated, by more than a million people in the next five years and eventually became the most frequently produced modern drama worldwide, entering the collective consciousness with a “Beckett-like landscape” and establishing the illusive Godot as a shorthand image of modern futility and angst. Eliot’s The Waste Land is for modern poetry and James Joyce’s Ulysses is for modern fiction. The theatrical and existential vision of Waiting for Godot makes it the watershed 20th-century drama-as explosive, groundbreaking, and influential a work as T.
If modern drama originates in the 19th century with Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, Beckett, with Waiting for Godot, extends the implications of their innovations into a radical kind of theatrical experience and method. It substitutes the core dramatic element of suspense-waiting-and forces the audience to experience the same anticipation and uncertainty of Vladimir and Estragon, while raising fundamental issues about the nature and purpose of existence itself, our own elemental version of waiting. Instead it detonates the accepted operating principles of drama that we expect to find in a play: a coherent sequence of actions, motives, and conflicts leading to a resolution. The play gratifies no expectations and resolves nothing. We never learn where the road leads nor see the tramps taking it. The tramps frequently say “Let’s go,” but they never move. As the play’s first director, Roger Blin, commented, “Imagine a play that contains no action, but characters that have nothing to say to each other.” The main characters-Vladimir and Estragon, nicknamed Didi and Gogo-are awaiting the arrival of Godot, but we never learn why, nor who he is, because he never arrives. Written during the winter of 1948–49, it would take Samuel Beckett four years to get it produced. Two tramps in bowler hats, a desolate country road, a single bare tree-the iconic images of a radically new modern drama confronted the audience at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on January 5, 1953, at the premiere of En attendant Godot ( Waiting for Godot ). Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd
It is open to philosophical, religious, and psychological interpretations, yet above all it is a poem on time, evanescence, and the mysteriousness of existence, the paradox of change and stability, necessity and absurdity. It is the peculiar richness of a play like Waiting for Godot that it opens vistas on so many different perspectives. Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
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