Waiting for Godot

The Play That Shouldn’t Work

Nothing happens in Waiting for Godot. This is not a loose description of its plot — it is almost a literal account. Vladimir and Estragon stand near a tree on a bare stage. They talk. They argue about whether they are in the right place. They consider leaving but do not leave. Pozzo arrives with Lucky on a rope. Lucky, commanded to think, delivers a long convulsive monologue of collapsing syntax. Pozzo and Lucky leave. A boy arrives to say Godot will not come today but will surely come tomorrow. The act ends. The second act repeats the first with minor, terrible variations: the tree has acquired a few leaves; Pozzo is now blind; Lucky is mute. The boy comes again. Vladimir and Estragon discuss hanging themselves from the tree but lack a sufficient rope. They decide to leave. They do not move. The play ends.

What Beckett understood — what the production history of the play proves — is that an audience watching two men wait is not watching nothing. It is watching time pass, which is what all audiences are always watching, but Waiting for Godot strips away the usual theatrical machinery that disguises this fact. No plot propels the audience forward. No mystery resolves. What the play generates instead is a form of attention to the present moment: to the quality of these two men’s companionship, to the rhythm of their speech, to the way habit and repetition and the occasional intrusion of strangers structure an otherwise featureless day.

Vladimir and Estragon are among the great double acts in theatrical history — more damaged than Laurel and Hardy, more philosophical than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who were invented partly in response to them), bound together by something that resembles love and absolutely is dependency. Their bickering is funny. Their mutual comfort in moments of distress is genuinely moving. The play produces feeling by refusing to manufacture it through conventional means.

What Are They Waiting For?

The interpretive history of Waiting for Godot is almost as rich as the play itself. Godot has been identified as God, death, meaning, the revolutionary future, the Allies arriving to liberate France, habit itself. Beckett refused to explain. When asked directly who Godot was, he said that if he had known, he would have put it in the play. This is not evasion but principle: a play that explained what Godot meant would not be the same play. The uncertainty is load-bearing.

What can be said is that the waiting is structured as a form of faith. Vladimir and Estragon do not know whether Godot exists, whether he will come, whether they are in the right place, or whether they had the right day. They wait anyway. This resembles religious observance and resembles human life generally — most of what people are waiting for never arrives, and the question the play poses is whether the waiting gives the days structure or merely fills them.

The most famous production in the play’s history took place in 1957 at San Quentin State Prison, where Herbert Blau’s company performed it for 1,400 inmates who had no exposure to theatrical convention and therefore no investment in finding the play difficult. They understood it immediately and responded to it with intense recognition. The prisoners knew about waiting. They knew about the daily repetition that passes for structure. They knew about the arrival of authorities with information that changed nothing. The San Quentin performance became legendary precisely because it demonstrated that the play was not an intellectual exercise — it was a description of something actual.

Its Influence

The influence of Waiting for Godot on subsequent theatre is so total that it can be difficult to perceive. The plays that came after it — Pinter’s pauses, Stoppard’s philosophical comedy, the entire tradition of post-dramatic theatre — are almost unimaginable without it. Before Beckett, theatre assumed that action was primary: something had to happen. After Beckett, the absence of action could itself be dramatic content. This was not a minor adjustment. It rewrote the grammar of the form.

The play also exists in dialogue with Beckett’s prose work — the great trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, written in the same extraordinary burst of creativity in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The same questions appear in both: the unreliability of self-knowledge, the inadequacy of language, the persistence of consciousness despite its inability to find a stable object. What the plays do that the novels cannot is stage these questions with other human bodies — the problem of consciousness becomes the problem of two men facing each other across a bare stage, unable to leave, unable to arrive at anything, continuing anyway.

Encountering Waiting for Godot for the first time is a disorienting experience, often comic in ways that feel unsettling, occasionally moving in ways that are hard to account for. Encountering it for the tenth time is a different disorientation: the play does not resolve into familiarity. It remains open. This is its final achievement — a work of art that cannot be exhausted because it refuses to close.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A play that turned the absence of everything theatre conventionally provides into one of the most powerful theatrical experiences of the 20th century, and has lost none of its strangeness.