Godot at 70: waiting for Beckett’s classic to evolve

Seventy years ago this week, in Paris, theatrical history was made when the curtain rose on a tramp in a bowler hat struggling to take off his boot. For Samuel Beckett, bringing En attendant Godot to the stage had been a similarly exasperating experience.

Written during the winter of 1948-49, the play had been turned down by a half-dozen producers before Beckett’s partner Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil sent it to the actor-director Roger Blin. He was initially hesitant to stage a work with no female parts, and which he struggled to understand. But Beckett’s Irishness (Blin had had success performing JM Synge’s plays), their shared taste for whiskey and the low cost of staging a five-hander with minimal set requirements won him over.

His associates proved less persuadable, and Blin spent more than two years trying to secure a theatre. “Let us wait for Godot,” Beckett told his publisher Jérôme Lindon in 1951, “but it won’t be tomorrow.” Aided by a grant from the French state, that four-year wait finally ended on January 5, 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone. Since the Left Bank theatre, located inside a converted shop, seemed doomed to go out of business, its manager had resolved to “finish in beauty”.

Not all early audience members shared that enthusiasm for a two-act play where, as critic Vivian Mercier wrote of its first Irish production a few years later, “nothing happens, twice”. Many left at the interval. Some jeered. But others were captivated by the limpid-yet-confounding story of two down-and-outs marooned on a country road and caught in a state of perpetually frustrated expectation. The reviewers praised Godot’s originality, tragicomic humour and humanity, with the playwright Jean Anouilh dubbing it a “masterpiece”. Those notices ensured that thousands came to see the inaugural production, which had two runs at the Babylone before touring France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

The English translation opened at London’s Arts Theatre in 1955 and met with a similarly divided reception, amid more post-interval walkouts and mid-performance outbursts. Bernard Levin dismissed the play as “twaddle”. But Beckett again benefited from the passionate support of influential critics, particularly Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan, who both emphasised Beckett’s playful debts to the music hall. Tynan also proclaimed that Godot had upended the rules of drama by stripping the form to its essence and proving that a play “is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored”. A successful West End transfer followed.

Although Beckett’s novels Molloy and Malone Dies had already brought critical esteem in France, it was Godot, originally conceived as a diversion from what he called the “awful prose” of his novels, that established his international reputation. A failed academic and obscure novelist, who had little prior experience of or even interest in theatre, he was propelled to literary glory in middle age by his first produced play. As Beckett told a friend in later life: “I had a great stroke of luck, an incomprehensible stroke of luck.”

That comment plausibly alludes to the pivotal support of Dechevaux-Dumesnil, Blin and Lindon in bringing his work to the world. It also evokes the contingent circumstances that led Beckett to settle in Paris in the late 1930s (it was cheaper than London). Following the Nazi invasion of 1940, which made it difficult to return to Ireland, he joined the Resistance and spent two years in hiding in the southern village of Roussillon (where Vladimir recalls having worked on the grape harvest in the French version of Godot). Like his characters, Beckett found himself stuck. And that long period of enforced idleness helped steer him away from the Joycean exuberance of his early work through the imposed discipline of writing in French. There followed a transformative revelation on a trip back to Dublin in 1946 — later immortalised in Krapp’s Last Tape — which triggered “the siege in the room” as Beckett wrote four novels and Godot in less than four years.

Beckett’s estate refuses to authorise any productions of ‘Godot’ featuring non-male actors

Godot helped create a new theatrical style, defined by recursive dialogue and enigmatic dramaturgy, which prefigured Edward Albee, Harold Pinter and David Mamet. The play’s bare-bones aesthetic and formal precision also underlie the vision of theatrical minimalism that director Peter Brook outlined in his seminal 1968 book The Empty Space. Yet Godot occupies an ambiguous position in the repertoire — thoroughly consecrated but far from overwhelmingly popular. It is usually staged in small to medium-sized non-commercial houses. There have only ever been four Broadway productions. After watching performances of Godot, I have often come away with the impression that many audience members were strenuously feigning enthusiasm for a play they didn’t enjoy but knew they were supposed to admire. A once-controversial playwright has become a mascot of cultural respectability, particularly in Ireland, where his name even adorns a naval patrol ship.

That peculiar evolution is arguably reinforced by the policies of the Beckett estate, which regularly locks horns with those tempted to take liberties with his texts. In keeping with the playwright’s instructions, the estate refuses to authorise any productions of Godot featuring non-male actors. That prohibition has been flouted, notably when Susan Sontag directed the play in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, also cutting the second act. But anyone attempting to do the same outside a combat zone can expect a barrage of litigation.

The risk of yielding on this point is that it would embolden egotistical theatre-makers to abandon the discipline of Beckett’s craft. But audiences themselves would by now surely be able to judge the difference between authentic Beckett and outlandish directorial interventions, and loosening restrictions might rescue Beckett from potential dismissals as an obdurate dead white male, which may already have contributed to Godot’s demotion from undergraduate literature syllabuses.

The estate has shown greater flexibility in other respects over the past 25 years, authorising stage adaptations of Beckett’s novels and short stories as well as film adaptations of his complete stage works. Lisa Dwan’s performances of Footfalls during the past decade also diverged from convention by featuring recordings of her own voice in the role of the unseen protagonist’s mother.

That staging, performed as part of a trilogy with Not I and Rockaby, has helped move the playwright’s late, short works towards the centre of the Beckett canon. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Peter Brook’s Fragments, consisting of five Beckett shorts, similarly wowed audiences across Europe and North America with their sublime comic energy. Godot hasn’t exactly been left on the shelf. But, even taking the pandemic into account, the absence of any major revivals in the UK and Ireland since Druid Theatre’s 2018 production suggests a shift in focus. If Godot captured the uncertain mood of the postwar era, today it is the more explicitly apocalyptic overtones of Endgame and Happy Days that seem to conjure a spirit of looming oblivion befitting the age of the Anthropocene.

Godot nonetheless retains its timeless resonance. Lockdowns forced us to experience the discomfort of living without existential momentum. But the play is about much more than waiting. Vladimir and Estragon simultaneously undergo the more basic agonies of hunger, homelessness and physical pain. In the French text, it is implied that they have spent time in prison, which makes it fitting that prisoners have been among the play’s most appreciative spectators. The tramps themselves are locked in a world of arbitrary suffering, for which no explanation is forthcoming. Exhausted by the burden of nothingness, they communicate in non-sequiturs, never quite managing to complete a thought. Pozzo and Lucky at first seem to have a better idea of what they are doing. But that facade of order is only sustained by cruelty and soon crumbles into despair and nonsense masquerading as enlightenment. Godot is ultimately a play about an inability to focus that requires intense concentration.

As I imagine these lost men pacing about the stage and struggling to pass the time, I see us staring at our phones, hoping for something . . . anything . . . to leap out at us from our screens. What exactly are we waiting for?