On the few occasions that Western absurdist plays were actually staged in Eastern Europe, the East European audiences found the plays highly relevant. A production of Waiting for Godot in Poland in 1956 and in Slovakia in 1969, for instance, both became something nearing a political demonstration. Both the Polish and Slovak audiences stressed that for them, this was a play about hope - hope against hope.
The tremendous impact of these productions in Eastern Europe can be perhaps compared with the impact of Waiting for Godot on the inmates of a Californian penitentiary, when it was staged there in 1957. Like the inmates of a gaol, people in Eastern Europe are possibly also freer of the numbing concerns of everyday living than the average Western man in the street. Since they live under pressure, this somehow brings them closer to the bare essentials of life and they are therefore more receptive to the works that deal with archetypal existential situations than is the case with an ordinary Wes-European citizen.
On the whole, East European absurd drama has been far less abstract and esoteric than its West European counterpart. Moreover, while the West European drama is usually considered as having spent itself by the end of the 1960s, several East European authors have been writing highly original plays in the absurdisy mould, well into the 1970s.
The main difference between the West European and the East European plays is that while the West European plays deal with a predicament of an individual or a group of individuals in a situation stripped to the bare, and often fairly abstract and metaphysical essentials, the East European plays mostly show and individual trapped within the cogwheels of a social system. The social context of the West European absurd plays is usually subdued and theoretical: in the East European plays it is concrete, menacing and fairly realistic: it is usually covered by very transparent metaphors. The social context is shown as a kind of Catch-22 system - it is a set of circumstances whose joint impact crushes the individual. The absurdity of the social system is highlighted and frequently shown as the result of the actions of stupid, misguided or evil people - this condemnation is of course merely implicit. Although the fundamental absurdity of the life feature in these plays is not intended to be metaphysically conditioned - these are primarily pieces of social satire - on reflection, the viewer will realise that there is fundamentally no difference between the 'messages' of the West European and the East European plays - except that the East European plays may be able to communicate these ideas more pressingly and more vividly to their audiences, because of their first-hand everyday experience of the absurdity that surrounds them.
At the end of the 1960s, the situation in Eastern Europe changed for the worse. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it became apparent that Russia would not tolerate a fuller liberalisation of the East European countries. Czechoslovakia was thrown into a harsh, neo-Stalinist mould, entering the time capsule of stagnating immobility, in which it has remained ever since. Since it had been primarily artists and intellectuals that were spearheading the liberalising reforms of the 1960s, the arts were now subjected to a vicious purge. Many well-known artists and intellectuals were turned into non-persons practically overnight: some left or were later forced to lea the country.
All the Czechoslovak absurdist playwrights fell into the non-person category. It is perhaps quite convincing evidence of the social relevance of their plays that the establishment feared them so much it felt the need to outlaw them. Several of the banned authors have continued writing, regardless of the fact that their plays cannot be staged in Czechoslovakia at present. They have been published and produced in the West.
As in the 1960s, these authors are still deeply socially conscious: for instance, Václav Havel, in the words of Martin Esslin, 'one of the most promising European playwrights of today', is a courageous defender of basic human values and one of the most important (and most thoughtful) spokespersons of the non-establishment groupings in Czechoslovakia.
By contrast, the Polish absurdist playwrights have been able to continue working in Poland undisturbed since the early 1960s, their plays having been normally published and produced within the country even throughout he 1970s.
It is perhaps quite interesting that even the Western absurd dramatists have gradually developed a need to defend basic human values. They have been showing solidarity with their East European colleagues. Ionesco was always deeply distrustful of politics and the clichéd language of the political establishment. Harold Pinter, who took part in a radio production of one of Václav Havel's plays from the 1970s several years ago, has frequently spoken in support of the East European writers and playwrights. Samuel Beckett has written a short play dedicated to Havel, which was staged in France in 1984 during a ceremony at the University of Toulouse, which awarded Havel an honorary doctorate.
©Dr Jan Culík, 2000
Setting
There is only one scene throughout both acts. Two men are waiting on a country road by a tree. The script calls for Estragon to sit on a low mound but in practice – as in Beckett’s own 1975 German production – this is usually a stone. In the first act the tree is bare. In the second, a few leaves have appeared despite the script specifying that it is the next day. The minimal description calls to mind “the idea of the ‘lieu vague’, a location which should not be particularised”.[55]
Alan Schneider once suggested putting the play on in a round – Pozzo has often been commented on as a ringmaster[56] – but Beckett dissuaded him: “I don’t in my ignorance agree with the round and feel Godot needs a very closed box.” He once even contemplated at one point having “faint shadow of bars on stage floor” but, in the end, decided against this level of what he called “explicitation”. (See Beckett in Berlin) In his 1975 Schiller-Theatre production there are times when Didi and Gogo appear to bounce off something “like birds trapped in the strands of [an invisible] net”, to use James Knowlson’s description. Didi and Gogo are only trapped because they still cling to the concept that freedom is possible; freedom is a state of mind, so is imprisonment.
[edit] Interpretations
Samuel Beckett[57]}}
"Because the play is so stripped down, so elemental, it invites all kinds of social and political and religious interpretation," wrote Normand Berlin in a tribute to the play in Autumn 1999, "with Beckett himself placed in different schools of thought, different movements and 'ism's. The attempts to pin him down have not been successful, but the desire to do so is natural when we encounter a writer whose minimalist art reaches for bedrock reality. 'Less' forces us to look for 'more,' and the need to talk about Godot and about Beckett has resulted in a steady outpouring of books and articles."[58]
Throughout Waiting for Godot, the reader or viewer may encounter religious, philosophical, classical, psychoanalytical and biographical — especially wartime — references. There are ritualistic aspects and elements literally lifted from vaudeville[59] and there is a danger in making more of these than what they are: that is, merely structural conveniences, avatars into which the writer places his fictional characters. The play "exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[60] Beckett makes this point emphatically clear in the opening notes to Film: "No truth value attaches to the above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience."[61] He made another important remark to Lawrence Harvey, saying that his "work does not depend on experience — [it is] not a record of experience. Of course you use it."[62]
Beckett tired quickly of "the endless misunderstanding". As far back as 1955, he remarked, "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can't make out."[63] He was not forthcoming with anything more than cryptic clues, however: "Peter Woodthrope [who played Estragon] remembered asking him one day in a taxi what the play was really about: 'It's all symbiosis, Peter; it's symbiosis,' answered Beckett."[64]
Beckett directed the play for the Schiller-Theatre in 1975. Although he had overseen many productions, this was the first time that he had taken complete control. Walter Asmus was his conscientious young assistant director. The production was not naturalistic. Beckett explained,
It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are lying on the ground, that cannot be handled naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality [...]. It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive."[65]
Over the years, Beckett clearly realised that the greater part of Godot's success came down to the fact that it was open to a variety of readings and that this was not necessarily a bad thing. Beckett himself sanctioned "one of the most famous mixed-race productions of Godot, performed at the Baxter Theatre in the University of Cape Town, directed by Donald Howarth, with [...] two black actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, playing Didi and Gogo; Pozzo, dressed in checked shirt and gumboots reminiscent of an Afrikaaner landlord, and Lucky ('a shanty town piece of white trash'[66]) were played by two white actors, Bill Flynn and Peter Piccolo [...]. The Baxter production has often been portrayed as if it were an explicitly political production, when in fact it received very little emphasis.[citation needed] What such a reaction showed, however, was that, although the play can in no way be taken as a political allegory, there are elements that are relevant to any local situation in which one man is being exploited or oppressed by another."[67]
[edit] Political interpretations
"It was seen as an allegory of the cold war"[68] or of French resistance to the Germans. Graham Hassell writes, "[T]he intrusion of Pozzo and Lucky [...] seems like nothing more than a metaphor for Ireland's view of mainland Britain, where society has ever been blighted by a greedy ruling élite keeping the working classes passive and ignorant by whatever means."[69]
The pair is often played with Irish accents, as in the Beckett on Film project. This, some feel, is an inevitable consequence of Beckett's rhythms and phraseology, but it is not stipulated in the text. At any rate, they are not of English stock: at one point early in the play, Estragon mocks the British pronunciation of "calm" and has fun with "the story of the Englishman in the brothel".[70]
[edit] Freudian interpretations
"Bernard Dukore develops a triadic theory in Didi, Gogo and the absent Godot, based on Freud's trinitarian description of the psyche in The Ego and the Id (1923) and the usage of onomastic techniques. Dukore defines the characters by what they lack: the rational Go-go embodies the incomplete ego, the missing pleasure principle: (e)go-(e)go. Di-di (id-id) — who is more instinctual and irrational — is seen as the backward id or subversion of the rational principle. Godot fulfils the function of the superego or moral standards. Pozzo and Lucky are just re-iterations of the main protagonists. Dukore finally sees Beckett's play as a metaphor for the futility of man's existence when salvation is expected from an external entity, and the self is denied introspection."[71]
[edit] Jungian interpretations
"The four archetypal personalities or the four aspects of the soul are grouped in two pairs: the ego and the shadow, the persona and the soul's image (animus or anima). The shadow is the container of all our despised emotions repressed by the ego. Lucky, the shadow serves as the polar opposite of the egocentric Pozzo, prototype of prosperous mediocrity, who incessantly controls and persecutes his subordinate, thus symbolising the oppression of the unconscious shadow by the despotic ego. Lucky's monologue in Act I appears as a manifestation of a stream of repressed unconsciousness, as he is allowed to "think" for his master. Estragon's name has another connotation, besides that of the aromatic herb, tarragon: "estragon" is a cognate of oestrogen, the female hormone (Carter, 130). This prompts us to identify him with the anima, the feminine image of Vladimir's soul. It explains Estragon's propensity for poetry, his sensitivity and dreams, his irrational moods. Vladimir appears as the complementary masculine principle, or perhaps the rational persona of the contemplative type."[72]
[edit] Existentialist interpretations
Broadly speaking, existentialists hold that there are certain questions that everyone must deal with if they are to take human life seriously, questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in that existence. By and large, they believe that life is very difficult and without an "objective" or universally known value: the individual must create value by affirming it and living it, not by talking about it. The play may be seen to touch on all of these issues.
[edit] Biblical interpretations
Much can be read into Beckett's inclusion of the story of the two thieves from Luke 23:39-43 and the ensuing discussion of repentance. It is easy to see the solitary tree as representative of the Christian cross or, indeed, the tree of life. Similarly, an obvious conclusion to which many jump is that, because Lucky describes God as having a white beard, and Godot, if the boy's testimony is to be believed, also has a white beard, God and Godot are one and the same. Vladimir's "Christ have mercy upon us!"[73] could be taken as evidence that that is at least what he believes.
This reading is given further weight early in the first act when Estragon asks Vladimir what it is that he has requested from Godot:
VLADIMIR: Oh ... nothing very definite.
ESTRAGON: A kind of prayer.
VLADIMIR: Precisely.
ESTRAGON: A vague supplication.
VLADIMIR: Exactly.[74]
Much of the play, sated as it is in scriptural allusion, deals with the subject of religion. The boy claims to be a goatherd, while his brother, he says, is a shepherd: in the Bible, goats represent the damned and sheep those who have been saved. This would appear to be at odds with the boys' testimony that, although Godot treats him fairly well, he is not averse to beating his shepherd-brother.
According to Anthony Cronin, "[Beckett] always possessed a Bible, at the end more than one edition, and Bible concordances were always among the reference books on his shelves."[75] Beckett himself was quite open on the issue: "Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar so I naturally use it."[76] As Cronin (one of his biographers) points out, his biblical references "may be ironic or even sarcastic".[77]
"In answer to a defence counsel question in 1937 (during a libel action brought by his uncle) as to whether he was a Christian, Jew or atheist, Beckett replied, 'None of the three'".[78] This, however, was not the occasion that put him off religious belief altogether. In a rare 1961 interview, he said: "I have no religious feeling. Once I had a religious emotion. It was at my first Communion. No more [...]. My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died. At the moment of crisis it has no more depth than an old school tie."[79]
Looking at Beckett's entire œuvre, Mary Bryden observed that "the hypothesised God who emerges from Beckett's texts is one who is both cursed for his perverse absence and cursed for his surveillant presence. He is by turns dismissed, satirised, or ignored, but he, and his tortured son, are never definitively discarded."[80]
55. ^ a b Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p 60
56. ^ Hampton, W., Theater Review: Celebrating With 'Waiting for Godot' New York Times, 11th June 2007
57. ^ Genest, G., ‘Memories of Samuel Beckett in the Rehearsals for Endgame, 1967’ in Ben-Zvi, L., (Ed.) Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p x
58. ^ Berlin 1999.
59. ^ The game of changing hats is an echo of the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup, which features almost exactly the same headgear-swapping action. See Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 609.
60. ^ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 391.
61. ^ Beckett, S., The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol III (New York: Grove Press, 2006), p. 371.
62. ^ An undated interview with Lawrence Harvey. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 371, 372.
63. ^ SB to Thomas MacGreevy, 11 August 1955 (TCD). Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 416.
64. ^ Interview with Peter Woodthrope, 18 February 1994. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 371, 372.
65. ^ Quoted in Asmus, W., ‘Beckett directs Godot’ in Theatre Quarterly, Vol V, No 19, 1975, pp. 23, 24. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 607.
66. ^ Irving Wardle, The Times, 19 February 1981.
67. ^ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp 638,639
68. ^ Peter Hall in The Guardian, 4 January 2003
69. ^ Hassell, G., ‘What's On’ London, 2nd - 9 July 1997.
70. ^ Beckett 2008, p. 8.
71. ^ Sion, I., "The Zero Soul: Godot's Waiting Selves In Dante's Waiting Rooms" in Transverse No 2, November 2004, p. 70.
72. ^ Sion, I., ‘The Shape of the Beckettian Self: Godot and the Jungian Mandala’ in Consciousness, Literature and the Arts Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006. See also Carter, S., ‘Estragon’s Ancient Wound: A Note on Waiting for Godot’ in Journal of Beckett Studies 6.1, p. 130.
73. ^ Beckett, S., Waiting for Godot, (London: Faber and Faber, [1956] 1988), p. 92.
74. ^ Beckett 2006, pp. 10-11.
75. ^ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 21.
76. ^ Duckworth, C., Angels of Darkness: Dramatic Effect in Samuel Beckett with Special Reference to Eugène Ionesco (London: Allen, 1972), p. 18. Quoted in Herren, G., ‘Nacht und Träume as Beckett's Agony in the Garden’ in Journal of Beckett Studies, 11(1)
77. ^ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 20, 21.
78. ^ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 279. Referenced in Bryden, M., ‘Beckett and Religion’ in Oppenheim, L., (Ed.) Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies (London: Palgrave, 2004), p. 157.
79. ^ An interview with Tom Driver in Graver, L. and Ferderman, R., (eds) Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 217.
80. ^ Bryden, M., Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), introduction.
availabli in http://www.wikipedia.org/
The tremendous impact of these productions in Eastern Europe can be perhaps compared with the impact of Waiting for Godot on the inmates of a Californian penitentiary, when it was staged there in 1957. Like the inmates of a gaol, people in Eastern Europe are possibly also freer of the numbing concerns of everyday living than the average Western man in the street. Since they live under pressure, this somehow brings them closer to the bare essentials of life and they are therefore more receptive to the works that deal with archetypal existential situations than is the case with an ordinary Wes-European citizen.
On the whole, East European absurd drama has been far less abstract and esoteric than its West European counterpart. Moreover, while the West European drama is usually considered as having spent itself by the end of the 1960s, several East European authors have been writing highly original plays in the absurdisy mould, well into the 1970s.
The main difference between the West European and the East European plays is that while the West European plays deal with a predicament of an individual or a group of individuals in a situation stripped to the bare, and often fairly abstract and metaphysical essentials, the East European plays mostly show and individual trapped within the cogwheels of a social system. The social context of the West European absurd plays is usually subdued and theoretical: in the East European plays it is concrete, menacing and fairly realistic: it is usually covered by very transparent metaphors. The social context is shown as a kind of Catch-22 system - it is a set of circumstances whose joint impact crushes the individual. The absurdity of the social system is highlighted and frequently shown as the result of the actions of stupid, misguided or evil people - this condemnation is of course merely implicit. Although the fundamental absurdity of the life feature in these plays is not intended to be metaphysically conditioned - these are primarily pieces of social satire - on reflection, the viewer will realise that there is fundamentally no difference between the 'messages' of the West European and the East European plays - except that the East European plays may be able to communicate these ideas more pressingly and more vividly to their audiences, because of their first-hand everyday experience of the absurdity that surrounds them.
At the end of the 1960s, the situation in Eastern Europe changed for the worse. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it became apparent that Russia would not tolerate a fuller liberalisation of the East European countries. Czechoslovakia was thrown into a harsh, neo-Stalinist mould, entering the time capsule of stagnating immobility, in which it has remained ever since. Since it had been primarily artists and intellectuals that were spearheading the liberalising reforms of the 1960s, the arts were now subjected to a vicious purge. Many well-known artists and intellectuals were turned into non-persons practically overnight: some left or were later forced to lea the country.
All the Czechoslovak absurdist playwrights fell into the non-person category. It is perhaps quite convincing evidence of the social relevance of their plays that the establishment feared them so much it felt the need to outlaw them. Several of the banned authors have continued writing, regardless of the fact that their plays cannot be staged in Czechoslovakia at present. They have been published and produced in the West.
As in the 1960s, these authors are still deeply socially conscious: for instance, Václav Havel, in the words of Martin Esslin, 'one of the most promising European playwrights of today', is a courageous defender of basic human values and one of the most important (and most thoughtful) spokespersons of the non-establishment groupings in Czechoslovakia.
By contrast, the Polish absurdist playwrights have been able to continue working in Poland undisturbed since the early 1960s, their plays having been normally published and produced within the country even throughout he 1970s.
It is perhaps quite interesting that even the Western absurd dramatists have gradually developed a need to defend basic human values. They have been showing solidarity with their East European colleagues. Ionesco was always deeply distrustful of politics and the clichéd language of the political establishment. Harold Pinter, who took part in a radio production of one of Václav Havel's plays from the 1970s several years ago, has frequently spoken in support of the East European writers and playwrights. Samuel Beckett has written a short play dedicated to Havel, which was staged in France in 1984 during a ceremony at the University of Toulouse, which awarded Havel an honorary doctorate.
©Dr Jan Culík, 2000
Setting
There is only one scene throughout both acts. Two men are waiting on a country road by a tree. The script calls for Estragon to sit on a low mound but in practice – as in Beckett’s own 1975 German production – this is usually a stone. In the first act the tree is bare. In the second, a few leaves have appeared despite the script specifying that it is the next day. The minimal description calls to mind “the idea of the ‘lieu vague’, a location which should not be particularised”.[55]
Alan Schneider once suggested putting the play on in a round – Pozzo has often been commented on as a ringmaster[56] – but Beckett dissuaded him: “I don’t in my ignorance agree with the round and feel Godot needs a very closed box.” He once even contemplated at one point having “faint shadow of bars on stage floor” but, in the end, decided against this level of what he called “explicitation”. (See Beckett in Berlin) In his 1975 Schiller-Theatre production there are times when Didi and Gogo appear to bounce off something “like birds trapped in the strands of [an invisible] net”, to use James Knowlson’s description. Didi and Gogo are only trapped because they still cling to the concept that freedom is possible; freedom is a state of mind, so is imprisonment.
[edit] Interpretations
Samuel Beckett[57]}}
"Because the play is so stripped down, so elemental, it invites all kinds of social and political and religious interpretation," wrote Normand Berlin in a tribute to the play in Autumn 1999, "with Beckett himself placed in different schools of thought, different movements and 'ism's. The attempts to pin him down have not been successful, but the desire to do so is natural when we encounter a writer whose minimalist art reaches for bedrock reality. 'Less' forces us to look for 'more,' and the need to talk about Godot and about Beckett has resulted in a steady outpouring of books and articles."[58]
Throughout Waiting for Godot, the reader or viewer may encounter religious, philosophical, classical, psychoanalytical and biographical — especially wartime — references. There are ritualistic aspects and elements literally lifted from vaudeville[59] and there is a danger in making more of these than what they are: that is, merely structural conveniences, avatars into which the writer places his fictional characters. The play "exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[60] Beckett makes this point emphatically clear in the opening notes to Film: "No truth value attaches to the above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience."[61] He made another important remark to Lawrence Harvey, saying that his "work does not depend on experience — [it is] not a record of experience. Of course you use it."[62]
Beckett tired quickly of "the endless misunderstanding". As far back as 1955, he remarked, "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can't make out."[63] He was not forthcoming with anything more than cryptic clues, however: "Peter Woodthrope [who played Estragon] remembered asking him one day in a taxi what the play was really about: 'It's all symbiosis, Peter; it's symbiosis,' answered Beckett."[64]
Beckett directed the play for the Schiller-Theatre in 1975. Although he had overseen many productions, this was the first time that he had taken complete control. Walter Asmus was his conscientious young assistant director. The production was not naturalistic. Beckett explained,
It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are lying on the ground, that cannot be handled naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality [...]. It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive."[65]
Over the years, Beckett clearly realised that the greater part of Godot's success came down to the fact that it was open to a variety of readings and that this was not necessarily a bad thing. Beckett himself sanctioned "one of the most famous mixed-race productions of Godot, performed at the Baxter Theatre in the University of Cape Town, directed by Donald Howarth, with [...] two black actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, playing Didi and Gogo; Pozzo, dressed in checked shirt and gumboots reminiscent of an Afrikaaner landlord, and Lucky ('a shanty town piece of white trash'[66]) were played by two white actors, Bill Flynn and Peter Piccolo [...]. The Baxter production has often been portrayed as if it were an explicitly political production, when in fact it received very little emphasis.[citation needed] What such a reaction showed, however, was that, although the play can in no way be taken as a political allegory, there are elements that are relevant to any local situation in which one man is being exploited or oppressed by another."[67]
[edit] Political interpretations
"It was seen as an allegory of the cold war"[68] or of French resistance to the Germans. Graham Hassell writes, "[T]he intrusion of Pozzo and Lucky [...] seems like nothing more than a metaphor for Ireland's view of mainland Britain, where society has ever been blighted by a greedy ruling élite keeping the working classes passive and ignorant by whatever means."[69]
The pair is often played with Irish accents, as in the Beckett on Film project. This, some feel, is an inevitable consequence of Beckett's rhythms and phraseology, but it is not stipulated in the text. At any rate, they are not of English stock: at one point early in the play, Estragon mocks the British pronunciation of "calm" and has fun with "the story of the Englishman in the brothel".[70]
[edit] Freudian interpretations
"Bernard Dukore develops a triadic theory in Didi, Gogo and the absent Godot, based on Freud's trinitarian description of the psyche in The Ego and the Id (1923) and the usage of onomastic techniques. Dukore defines the characters by what they lack: the rational Go-go embodies the incomplete ego, the missing pleasure principle: (e)go-(e)go. Di-di (id-id) — who is more instinctual and irrational — is seen as the backward id or subversion of the rational principle. Godot fulfils the function of the superego or moral standards. Pozzo and Lucky are just re-iterations of the main protagonists. Dukore finally sees Beckett's play as a metaphor for the futility of man's existence when salvation is expected from an external entity, and the self is denied introspection."[71]
[edit] Jungian interpretations
"The four archetypal personalities or the four aspects of the soul are grouped in two pairs: the ego and the shadow, the persona and the soul's image (animus or anima). The shadow is the container of all our despised emotions repressed by the ego. Lucky, the shadow serves as the polar opposite of the egocentric Pozzo, prototype of prosperous mediocrity, who incessantly controls and persecutes his subordinate, thus symbolising the oppression of the unconscious shadow by the despotic ego. Lucky's monologue in Act I appears as a manifestation of a stream of repressed unconsciousness, as he is allowed to "think" for his master. Estragon's name has another connotation, besides that of the aromatic herb, tarragon: "estragon" is a cognate of oestrogen, the female hormone (Carter, 130). This prompts us to identify him with the anima, the feminine image of Vladimir's soul. It explains Estragon's propensity for poetry, his sensitivity and dreams, his irrational moods. Vladimir appears as the complementary masculine principle, or perhaps the rational persona of the contemplative type."[72]
[edit] Existentialist interpretations
Broadly speaking, existentialists hold that there are certain questions that everyone must deal with if they are to take human life seriously, questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in that existence. By and large, they believe that life is very difficult and without an "objective" or universally known value: the individual must create value by affirming it and living it, not by talking about it. The play may be seen to touch on all of these issues.
[edit] Biblical interpretations
Much can be read into Beckett's inclusion of the story of the two thieves from Luke 23:39-43 and the ensuing discussion of repentance. It is easy to see the solitary tree as representative of the Christian cross or, indeed, the tree of life. Similarly, an obvious conclusion to which many jump is that, because Lucky describes God as having a white beard, and Godot, if the boy's testimony is to be believed, also has a white beard, God and Godot are one and the same. Vladimir's "Christ have mercy upon us!"[73] could be taken as evidence that that is at least what he believes.
This reading is given further weight early in the first act when Estragon asks Vladimir what it is that he has requested from Godot:
VLADIMIR: Oh ... nothing very definite.
ESTRAGON: A kind of prayer.
VLADIMIR: Precisely.
ESTRAGON: A vague supplication.
VLADIMIR: Exactly.[74]
Much of the play, sated as it is in scriptural allusion, deals with the subject of religion. The boy claims to be a goatherd, while his brother, he says, is a shepherd: in the Bible, goats represent the damned and sheep those who have been saved. This would appear to be at odds with the boys' testimony that, although Godot treats him fairly well, he is not averse to beating his shepherd-brother.
According to Anthony Cronin, "[Beckett] always possessed a Bible, at the end more than one edition, and Bible concordances were always among the reference books on his shelves."[75] Beckett himself was quite open on the issue: "Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar so I naturally use it."[76] As Cronin (one of his biographers) points out, his biblical references "may be ironic or even sarcastic".[77]
"In answer to a defence counsel question in 1937 (during a libel action brought by his uncle) as to whether he was a Christian, Jew or atheist, Beckett replied, 'None of the three'".[78] This, however, was not the occasion that put him off religious belief altogether. In a rare 1961 interview, he said: "I have no religious feeling. Once I had a religious emotion. It was at my first Communion. No more [...]. My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died. At the moment of crisis it has no more depth than an old school tie."[79]
Looking at Beckett's entire œuvre, Mary Bryden observed that "the hypothesised God who emerges from Beckett's texts is one who is both cursed for his perverse absence and cursed for his surveillant presence. He is by turns dismissed, satirised, or ignored, but he, and his tortured son, are never definitively discarded."[80]
55. ^ a b Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p 60
56. ^ Hampton, W., Theater Review: Celebrating With 'Waiting for Godot' New York Times, 11th June 2007
57. ^ Genest, G., ‘Memories of Samuel Beckett in the Rehearsals for Endgame, 1967’ in Ben-Zvi, L., (Ed.) Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p x
58. ^ Berlin 1999.
59. ^ The game of changing hats is an echo of the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup, which features almost exactly the same headgear-swapping action. See Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 609.
60. ^ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 391.
61. ^ Beckett, S., The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol III (New York: Grove Press, 2006), p. 371.
62. ^ An undated interview with Lawrence Harvey. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 371, 372.
63. ^ SB to Thomas MacGreevy, 11 August 1955 (TCD). Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 416.
64. ^ Interview with Peter Woodthrope, 18 February 1994. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 371, 372.
65. ^ Quoted in Asmus, W., ‘Beckett directs Godot’ in Theatre Quarterly, Vol V, No 19, 1975, pp. 23, 24. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 607.
66. ^ Irving Wardle, The Times, 19 February 1981.
67. ^ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp 638,639
68. ^ Peter Hall in The Guardian, 4 January 2003
69. ^ Hassell, G., ‘What's On’ London, 2nd - 9 July 1997.
70. ^ Beckett 2008, p. 8.
71. ^ Sion, I., "The Zero Soul: Godot's Waiting Selves In Dante's Waiting Rooms" in Transverse No 2, November 2004, p. 70.
72. ^ Sion, I., ‘The Shape of the Beckettian Self: Godot and the Jungian Mandala’ in Consciousness, Literature and the Arts Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006. See also Carter, S., ‘Estragon’s Ancient Wound: A Note on Waiting for Godot’ in Journal of Beckett Studies 6.1, p. 130.
73. ^ Beckett, S., Waiting for Godot, (London: Faber and Faber, [1956] 1988), p. 92.
74. ^ Beckett 2006, pp. 10-11.
75. ^ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 21.
76. ^ Duckworth, C., Angels of Darkness: Dramatic Effect in Samuel Beckett with Special Reference to Eugène Ionesco (London: Allen, 1972), p. 18. Quoted in Herren, G., ‘Nacht und Träume as Beckett's Agony in the Garden’ in Journal of Beckett Studies, 11(1)
77. ^ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 20, 21.
78. ^ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 279. Referenced in Bryden, M., ‘Beckett and Religion’ in Oppenheim, L., (Ed.) Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies (London: Palgrave, 2004), p. 157.
79. ^ An interview with Tom Driver in Graver, L. and Ferderman, R., (eds) Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 217.
80. ^ Bryden, M., Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), introduction.
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