Waiting for Godot — Commentary

In brief

On a country road with a single tree, Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for a man called Godot. They are not sure they have met him, what he has promised or whether this is the right place. A traveller called Pozzo arrives, driving a man called Lucky on a rope; they talk, eat, perform and go. A boy brings word that Godot will not come this evening but will surely come tomorrow. The next day much the same thing happens, slightly worse. Samuel Beckett wrote it in French in the winter of 1948 to 1949, and translated it himself. The subtitle, in English, is “a tragicomedy in two acts”.

The argument

Vivian Mercier’s joke is the most quoted thing ever said about the play: it is one “in which nothing happens, twice”. It is a good joke and a poor description. A great deal happens in Godot: men are beaten, humiliated, fed, abandoned, blinded and struck dumb. What does not happen is the one thing the people on stage have organised their lives around. The action of the play is the waiting itself, and everything else is what you do while it lasts.

The usual question, who is Godot, is therefore the wrong one, and Beckett was firm about it from the beginning. “I don’t know who Godot is”, he wrote in the note read out for a French radio broadcast in 1952, adding that he did not even know whether Godot exists. The better question is what the waiting does for the two men. It gives them an appointment. Vladimir, late in the second act, is almost proud: “We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment.” That is as near as he comes to a creed. To keep faith with something that may not exist looks ridiculous and may be the only dignity going, and the play will not tell you which.

What saves this from being a philosophy lecture is that it is a double act. The play’s grimmest thoughts arrive with hats and boots and falling trousers. Its pair have plainly been together for decades, and neither can leave. I take that to be the real argument. A world without an explanation can still hold a friendship, and the friendship is made of the same material as the despair: routine, repetition and a joke that still gets a response. Nothing in the play says this is enough. Vladimir and Estragon go on behaving as though it is.

The two acts

Two acts are exactly enough: one would be a sketch, and three would imply progress. Wikipedia gives a plain summary of Act I and Act II.

Act I. It opens on Estragon’s struggle with a boot and his line “Nothing to be done”, which is about the boot and also about everything else. The two men talk, consider hanging themselves and establish why they cannot go: “We’re waiting for Godot.” Pozzo and Lucky take up the middle of the act. On Pozzo’s order to think, Lucky delivers a torrent of academic rubble. The boy comes. Estragon proposes leaving, Vladimir says “Yes, let’s go”, and neither moves.
Act II. The tree has grown a few leaves. Estragon has forgotten yesterday and Vladimir insists on it. Pozzo returns blind and Lucky mute, and Pozzo cannot say when anything happened. Pozzo’s rage at the question produces the play’s most famous image of a life, “They give birth astride of a grave”. The boy comes again and says he has never met them. They discuss hanging themselves again and have no rope. The closing exchange repeats the first act’s with the speakers swapped, and neither moves.

The design works by small subtraction. Each repetition leaves something missing: Pozzo’s sight, Lucky’s speech, the boy’s memory. A third act could only subtract further, and Beckett’s later work is, in a sense, that third act.

The voice

The English of Godot is made of short, ordinary phrases with their rhythm set by the pause. The stage directions are part of the music, and they are frequent. It sounds natural and is almost as patterned as verse, with exchanges passed back and forth like a ball. Vladimir says as much when he demands a return of serve from Estragon. The men have a culture they have mostly lost, with scraps of scripture and half-remembered learning. When Mercier suggested that Didi and Gogo talked as though they had PhDs, Beckett asked how he knew they had not.

Pozzo has a different instrument, the stagey oratory of a man listening to himself, and it is why his remark that “The tears of the world are a constant quantity” is both ridiculous and true. Vladimir tries the same high style in the second act, announcing that “all mankind is us” while Pozzo lies on the ground calling for help and the talk goes on. Lucky’s speech is the voice taken apart altogether, the sentences of academic theology breaking down into repeated syllables.

Two texts, one author

Beckett wrote En attendant Godot first, and began his English version early in 1953, sending it to his American publisher Barney Rosset at Grove around the new year of 1954. It is not a translation in the ordinary sense. Antoni Libera, a Polish translator of Beckett, argued that the two should be treated as versions in two languages, and Jadwiga Uchman’s comparison of the texts sets out the changes.

Place. Lucky’s “Seine Seine-et-Oise Seine-et-Marne Marne-et-Oise” become “Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham”, which keeps the rhythm and adds some rudeness. Voltaire becomes Bishop Berkeley, and Normandy becomes Connemara.
Names. Lucky’s Poinçon turns into Puncher. Estragon’s answer to Pozzo, Catulle in French, was Catullus in the first Faber text and Adam in the American one.
Ireland. The English is more Irish than the French is anything. Pozzo’s pipe comes from Kapp and Peterson, the Dublin tobacconists, and Estragon calls it a dudeen.
Vagueness. Commentators note a general “vaguening”. The French names the farmer Bonnelly; in the English Vladimir cannot recall the name. Beckett went on trimming the text for the rest of his life.

The London text had another layer. The Lord Chamberlain’s censor forced changes in 1955, so “erection” came out, and Faber’s first edition in 1956 was the “mutilated” form. The Royal Court gave the first unexpurgated English production at the end of 1964. The best modern text is the revised one in The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, volume I (1993), edited by Dougald McMillan and Knowlson, which uses Beckett’s own revisions as a director.

The people

Vladimir and Estragon

Didi stands and thinks; his bladder troubles him. Gogo sits and sleeps; his feet trouble him. The text never calls them tramps, though they are nearly always dressed as such. Roger Blin recalled Beckett being sure only that they wore bowlers, and audiences have long thought of Laurel and Hardy. Vladimir holds the memory and suffers for it, while Estragon’s forgetfulness is a mercy he cannot share.

Pozzo and Lucky

Pozzo says he is taking Lucky to market to sell him, though the two have been together for sixty years. Hugh Kenner saw in Pozzo a German occupier or a landlord of the Protestant Ascendancy; Beckett told Alan Schneider that he was a hypomaniac and should be played mad. Whichever you choose, the rope holds both of them, and in Act II that is literally what guides the blind master. Political readings of the pair began early, and Beckett disowned the crudest.

The Boy

The cast list has one Boy, who may or may not be the one who came yesterday, with a brother who is beaten by Godot while he is not. The nearest thing in the play to a theology is this arbitrary favour, which echoes the two thieves that trouble Vladimir early on.

Godot

Godot is the most discussed man who never appears. Beckett said that if he had meant God he would have said God; he also conceded he could not ignore what people heard in the name, and pointed out that he wrote it in French. Other offered origins include godillot, slang for a boot, and a racing cyclist called Godeau. Beckett pronounced the name with weight on the first syllable or evenly, by different accounts. Americans tend to stress the second.

How it was made

Beckett, born in Dublin in 1906, had worked for the French Resistance as a courier. When his network was betrayed in August 1942 he and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil fled on foot to Roussillon, in the Vaucluse, where he stayed for two years. Two people walking by night and sleeping in the day have an obvious connection to the play, and it has been described as a metaphor for that walk. He told Ruby Cohn that a source was Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon.

He wrote the French text between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. Suzanne took it round the producers until it reached Roger Blin. Les Éditions de Minuit published it in the autumn of 1952, ahead of any full staging.

On the stage

Paris, 1953. Blin directed it at the small Théâtre de Babylone, opening to the public on 5 January. When the actor engaged for Pozzo left for better pay, Blin played the part himself with a pillow as a belly. Contrary to legend the reviewers were largely kind, though one night the curtain came down after Lucky’s speech because of a noisy protest. A prisoner at Lüttringhausen in Germany translated it and staged it that same November, and wrote to Beckett about it. Beckett was deeply moved.

London, 1955. The young Peter Hall directed the first English production at the Arts Theatre, opening on 3 August. Hall told the cast he hadn’t “the foggiest idea” what some of it meant. The first night saw walkouts and groans. Then on Sunday 7 August Kenneth Tynan in the Observer and Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times turned it round, and it moved to the Criterion. At the first Evening Standard awards, a revolt led by Sir Malcolm Sargent produced the compromise of “The Most Controversial Play of the Year”.

America, 1956. The American opening, in Miami, was billed as “the laugh sensation of two continents” to an audience of holidaymakers, who left. Broadway followed in April with a new director, and with Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion of The Wizard of Oz, as Estragon.

San Quentin, 1957. On 19 November, Herbert Blau’s San Francisco Actor’s Workshop played it for one night in the prison, for an audience given as 1,400 convicts in Martin Esslin’s account; other accounts say about a thousand. Esslin, who opened The Theatre of the Absurd with this night, says no live play had been seen there since 1913. The actors were afraid. In his telling, the audience grasped at once what had bewildered sophisticated theatregoers elsewhere. A lifer named Rick Cluchey started a drama workshop in the prison and later assisted Beckett on a production in Berlin. Nothing anyone has written about the play explains it as well as that audience did.

Since then it has gone wherever waiting is a political fact. John Kani and Winston Ntshona played Didi and Gogo at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 1980, with Beckett’s approval. Susan Sontag staged it during the siege of Sarajevo in 1993. Paul Chan and the Classical Theatre of Harlem took it to the flooded Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in 2007. A Royal National Theatre poll in 1998 voted it the most significant English-language play of the century. Star revivals keep it commercially alive, as with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in 2009, Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati in 2024, and Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in 2025.

The estate

Beckett wanted the text and the gender of the cast kept as written, and his estate has continued to press that. “Women don’t have prostates”, he said, of Vladimir’s frequent exits. In 1988 he sued a Dutch company, De Haarlemse Toneelschuur, over an all-female production and lost, and he briefly banned his plays in the Netherlands. The courts have mostly ruled for the actors since. A French judge allowed an all-female Avignon production in 1991, with the estate’s objection read out before each performance, and a Rome court allowed another in 2006. The estate’s representative also objected to music in Neil Armfield’s Sydney production in 2003. Whatever you make of it, performance is licensed, and the licence is not a formality.

How to read it

Nothing here gives you the whole text, and that is deliberate. The play is in copyright, and the free PDFs that surface in searches are spam or unlicensed. Beckett died on 22 December 1989. The EU term, which the Czech Republic follows, is life plus seventy years to the end of the calendar year, so both French and English texts stay protected through 2059 and come free on 1 January 2060.
The US date is earlier and differs by text. American terms run 95 years from publication, so the French text of 1952 runs through 2047 and the English, with Grove’s notice of 1954, through 2049. Standard Ebooks counts from 1953 and gives 1 January 2049. Quotations here are limited to a few short phrases.
Buy the Faber or Grove paperback. Grove and Faber both keep it in print cheaply, and Minuit publishes the French. If you read French at all, read that as well.
See it before you analyse it. A live production is the only way to feel how the time passes. Read it slowly, with the pauses, otherwise.
Do not hunt for Godot. Watch what the two men do to get through the next minute.