Waiting for Godot is one of the most famous plays of the 20th Century. In it, two characters
named Vladimir and Estragon pass the time on a country road as they wait for a man named
Godot to arrive. The play is famously weird and mysterious and open-ended - prompting
the question - What is this story about?
The play massively interests me as an actor, because it's brilliant and really, really
fun to perform, but it also interests me as a man with a background in philosophy, because
it is part of the Theatre of the Absurd. Absurdism is a philosophical movement that wound up
influencing a lot of 20th Century art, through a rather interesting story:
Alors, bienvenue à Paris dans l'entre-deux-guerres. C'est un temps de culture et de pensée florissante.
Oh! Voilà le célèbre philosophe Jean Paul Satre! Et Simone de Beauvoir! Et l'artiste
Salvador Dali! Vous avez l'air en bonne forme, Sal! Et aussi, en Paris en ce moment
le dramaturge Samuel Beckett et le philosophe Albert Camus.
Samuel Beckett was an Irishman who moved to Paris in 1928 and sank into this cultural
milieu that was going on. At the time it was very fashionable for 'philosopher'
and 'creative artist' to be fused in one person: philosophers wrote literature and writers
wrote philosophy. And then, something very bad happened. Something called WWII. France
is invaded by the Nazis. And so 'philosopher,' 'creative artist,' and 'resistance fighter'
become fused into single persons, as both Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus join the underground resistance.
And this is the context in which Camus writes his most famous work - 'The Myth of Sisyphus'
- in 1942. The book asks 'How Should We Confront the Absurd?' The Absurd, with a
Capital A, is a technical term in Camus' writing: it refers to the contradiction between
humanity's desire to find meaning in the Universe and the Universe itself, which is completely meaningless.
And once you realise that life is pointless
but you are compelled to find a point to it anyway, Camus says there are seven possible responses. anyway. Number one, you could kill yourself.
Number two, you could try to ignore it by filling your life with pleasure of food, drink,
and uh, company. Number three, you could just deny it: for insatnce you could be religious and say that no,
there is meaning in life because the meaning comes from God. Or you could be an existentialist,
and say that maybe you don't go in for organised religion so much but in some sense you create your own meaning in
life. Camus saw both of those as forms of denial, he says you're still not really looking
life in the face because ultimately the universe is meaningless. Which is why he didn't like to be called
an existentialist, although his work does have some themes in common with that.
The fourth way of confronting the Absurd is to become an actor, and try to live lives
that pretend to have meaning within the context of stories. Fifth is to become another kind of artist, like
a painter, somebody who creates works of art that have meanings as a substitute for living a life with one.
And the sixth is to become a political person, like a conqueror. Somebody for whom
power and government and the right way to use those things, fills up their time and gives them meaning.
All of these methods Camus considers and ultimately rejects. But the seventh and final method of confronting the Absurd, the one that he actually recommends,
is acceptance. Accepting that life is pointless but that you
are compelled to find a point to it anyway. But this acceptance isn't a kind of sad, passive, depressing
acceptance: Camus thought it was an act of resistance against the Universe
itself. You look life square in the face; you don't deny it, you don't distract yourself
and you don't give in, and you live life anyway in full knowledge of its pointlessness.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was doomed to roll a boulder up a mountain every day
and then watch it roll back down again every night. Forever. And Camus says that's
the only way Sisyphus can really be happy is he accepts the pointlessness of that task. And he
decides to own it and go down the mountain every night smiling. You can see how
living in Nazi-occupied France informed a lot of these ideas: this feeling of fighting what looked
like an unwinnable battle against uncaring forces indulging in pointless inhuman destruction,
was a feeling Camus was very familiar with day to day. The final line of the book is "One must
imagine Sisyphus happy."
And then we come to 1953, and the premiere performance of Waiting for Godot. À l'époque,
c'était en Français: 'En attendant Godot'; The English translation came two years later.
In it, Vladimir and Estragon are engaged in what seems to be a neverending, pointless, and
often repetetive task - waiting for Godot. Waiting for Godot is the whole reason they are there
and yet he never turns up. So their situation is rather like someone else's we've just met!
The play is about what people do when confronted with the Absurd: with the compulsion
to find meaning where no meaning exists. And throughout the play, the characters try every method
of confronting the Absurd that Camus suggests. They talk about killing themselves, but they don't.
They talk about attempting some sexual pleasure, or becoming more physically comfortable with
food or with their shoes. Vladimir considers some religious ideas at various points but it doesn't
seem to satisfy him.
All of the characters are of course, metatextually, played by actors, and so they are examining that way of confronting
it too. Vladimir tries singing at one point, and various popular interpretations of the
characters present the two as being rather like a music hall double act generally. One of the other characters,
Pozzo, who has a slave called Lucky. Having that power over him seems to give
his life a lot of meaning, or at least structure, but by Act II it doesn't seem to have made him better off.
By the end of the play, Didi and Gogo seem doomed to wait for Godot forever. They
don't seem to be able to accept that, if he exists at all, he's not coming. Interestingly, there is one character
in the play who I think maybe does accept the Absurd. They are charged with carrying
a heavy burden, but when offered comfort and distraction willingly go back to that burden and pick it up again.
It's Lucky - the so-called slave. I think - at this particular stage of my artistic
career and I reserve the right to change my mind later - but I think you could read Lucky as Camus' model of the
Absurdist Hero. Somebody who knows that their life is a pointless, horrible chore but who gets on with it anyway. And
when Lucky finally speaks to Vladimir, Estragon, and Pozzo, they, and the audience, are incapable of
understanding a word he's saying.
You see what I mean? 'Waiting for Godot' is just the staged version of 'The Myth of Sisyphus.'
It's a work of philosophy in dramatic form. Of course if you're an actor, none of this
tells you how you should play the roles. There's a big difference between delivering a lecture
on symbolism in Beckett and actually getting up and making somebody feel something, but if you're going
to see 'Waiting for Godot' as an audience member, which you should, then I hope that this helps you understand it a little better.
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