VLADIMIR: Did you ever read the Bible?
ESTRAGON: The Bible ... (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it.
VLADIMIR: Do you remember the Gospels?
ESTRAGON: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty.
The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll
go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon ....
VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.
ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?
Silence.
VLADIMIR: Where was I ... How’s your foot?
ESTRAGON: Swelling visibly.
VLADIMIR: Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story?
ESTRAGON:No.
VLADIMIR: Shall I tell it to you?
ESTRAGON:No.
VLADIMIR: It’ll pass the time. (Pause.) Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our
Saviour. One –
ESTRAGON: Our what?
VLADIMIR: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the
other ... (he searches for the contrary of saved) ... damned.
ESTRAGON: Saved from what?
VLADIMIR: Hell.
ESTRAGON: I’m going.
He does not move.
VLADIMIR: And yet ... (pause) ... how is it – this is not boring you I hope – how is it
that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them
were there – or thereabouts – and only one speaks of a thief being saved. (Pause.)
Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?As well as action and set, Beckett dispenses with the convention that the redun-
dancy and inconsequence of everyday conversation is purged from stage dialogue.
Vladimir’s attempt to debate the chances of salvation is held under difficult condi-
tions,for weak reason is at the mercy of a weaker physique. The gushing stream of
consciousness of James Joyce divides into two dripping taps. The absence of context
means that the audience’s consciousness begins to stream, filling the void with poss-
ible meanings. The text, and the tree, suggest at times the Crucifixion and the
Garden of Eden, at other times nothing at all.
But even less than in Prufrock are these grand comparisons lived up to, as urgent
or tri vial physical needs lower the tone spectacularly, rather as in the Heath scenes
in King Lear, or the medieval play of Cain and Abel. Man without God is farcical as
well as miserable. Beckett brings modernist literature home to an audience by
inve rting the relation between text and audience found in Finnegans Wake: instead
of far too much meaning there is too little. The audience has to make sense of a
verbal and visual text as spare as an Imagist poem and as basic as a music-hall
sket ch. By letting in audience imagination, Beckett made extremist minority art
immediate, involving, universal. His early tragicomic novels appeal to intellectuals.
But another early work, a tribute to the silent film comedian Buster Keaton, was the
route to the music-hall solution Eliot had tried and abandoned in Sweeney
Agonistes.
Beckett’s later work further reduces the dramatic elements: the number of
ac tors, of their movements, of their moving parts, of their words. Words achieved
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