The anti-naturalist detail about the leaves on the tree – implying that, in fact, more than a ‘day’ has passed between the first and second act – supports the notion that we should extrapolate the action of the play and consider it as representative of a longer span of time. Given the similarity between ‘God’ and ‘Godot’, some critics have analysed the play as being fundamentally about religion: God(ot) is supposed to be turning up (possibly a second coming: Vladimir and Estragon cannot recall whether they’ve met Godot before), but his arrival is always delayed with the promise that he will come ‘tomorrow’.Īnd in the meantime, all that the play’s two main characters can do is idle away the time, doomed to boredom and repetitive monotony. When the French playwright Jean Anouilh saw the Paris premiere of the play in 1953, he described it as ‘ The Thoughts of Pascal performed by clowns’. In Camus’ essay, Sisyphus survives the pointless repetition of his task, the rolling of a boulder up a hill only to see it fall to the bottom just as he’s about to reach the top, by seeing the ridiculousness in the situation and laughing at it.)Īnd the discrepancy between what the play addresses, which is often deeply philosophical and complex, and how Beckett’s characters discuss it, is one of the most distinctive features of Waiting for Godot. (An important aspect of Camus’ ‘ Myth of Sisyphus’ is being able to laugh at the absurdity of human endeavour and the repetitive and futile nature of our lives – which all sounds like a pretty good description of Waiting for Godot. In this regard, comparisons with Albert Camus and existentialism make sense in that both are often taken to be more serious than they actually are: or rather, they are deadly serious but also alive to the comedy in everyday desperation and futility. Among Beckett’s many influences, we can detect, in the relationship and badinage between Vladimir and Estragon, the importance of music-hall theatre and the comic double act and vaudeville performers wouldn’t last five minutes up on stage if they indulged in pretentiousness. Waiting for Godot is a play which cuts through pretence and sees the comedy as well as the quiet tragedy in human existence. But it is clear that they are fairly well-educated, given their vocabularies and frames of reference.Īnd yet, cutting across their philosophical and theological discussions is their plain-speaking and unpretentious attitude to these topics. Precisely what social class Vladimir and Estragon come from is not known. The other well-known thing about Waiting for Godot is that Vladimir and Estragon are tramps – except that the text never mentions this fact, and Beckett explicitly stated that he ‘saw’ the two characters dressed in bowler hats (otherwise, he said, he couldn’t picture what they should look like): hardly the haggard and unkempt tramps of popular imagination. The key lies not so much in the what as in the how.
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