1955, following plays by Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In The
Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus had put forward the idea of ‘the absurd’, a philo-
sophical reaction to the unintelligibility of life, which under the German occupation
of Paris had become greater than usual.La Cantatrice Chauve (1948) by Eugène
Ionesco was the first comedy of the Theatre of the Absurd (The Bald Prima Donna,
London, 1958). Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble visited in 1956, the year of Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger. In 1957 came Pinter’s The Birthday Party. But London had seen
nothing like Godot.Beckett’s comic, experimental novels had been ignored. He now
became the West’s leading literary dramatist.
Waiting for Godot can be misunderstood – as Chekhov can – as merely bleak, espe-
cially by students who have not seen it. Subtitled ‘a tragicomedy in two acts’, its mood
is one of gaiety, and the characters are clowns not tramps. ‘Life is first boredom, then
fear’, Larkin was to write later. Beckett would think that formulation too solemn.
Modernist nihilism of a theatrical kind had been prominent in Eliot’s The Waste
Land:
‘What is that noise?’
The wind under the door.
‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
Nothing again nothing.
‘Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?’
A drama, said Aristotle, is the imitation of an action. In Waiting for Godot nothing
happens. Indeed, famously, nothing happens twice. Vladimir and Estragon await the
arrival of Godot, a name which adds a French diminutive ending to ‘God’ (in France,
Charlie Chaplin was called ‘Charlot’).But, whoever he is, he doesn’t arrive. The play
ends:
VLADIMIR: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.
ESTRAGON: And if he comes?
VLADIMIR: We’ll be saved.
Vladimir takes off Lucky’s hat , peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, knocks on
the crown, puts it on again.
ESTRAGON: Well? Shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.
ESTRAGON: What?
VLADIMIR: Put on your trousers.
ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my trousers?
VLADIMIR: Pull ON your trousers.
ESTRAGON:(realizing his trousers are down). True.
He pulls up his trousers.
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
CURTAIN
No thing happens, but words happen. Attempted reasoning replaces plot, and
language becomes supreme. Set directions read: ‘Act I. A country road. A tree.
Evening’, and ‘Act II. Next day. Same time. Same place.’ To this tree come Vladimir and
Estragon, with their music-hall boots, trousers and bowler hat. Vladimir is the funny
man and Estragon the straight man (like Laurel and Hardy, the film comics). Their
cross-talk also comes from the music hall:382 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80