Ben Whishaw as Vladimir
and Lucian Msamati as Estragon
Haymarket Theatre, London
Photo by Marc Brenner
Waiting for Godot – Footnotes
The Footnotes that accompany our episode on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot comprise thoughts on some of Beckett’s sources of inspiration for the play, on the theme of waiting, as well as a few interesting details about the first productions of the play.
Not listened to the episode yet? You’ll find it here.
Visual sources
During my research on the play, I came across a number of different suggestions as to what specific images or experiences may have inspired Beckett’s conception of the play. We touched on some of these in our conversation in the podcast, starting with the mention of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. In fact, there are two quite similar paintings of his which Beckett cited at different times. They both depict two figures standing on a rocky promontory, near the silhouette of a gnarled tree, gazing at a moonlit sky. The first is entitled Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, dating from 1824. Many years after his writing the play, when Beckett was visiting the gallery in Berlin where this painting hangs, he is reported to have stated that this was the source for Waiting for Godot. At other times in his life, he referred to an earlier Friedrich painting, Two Men Contemplating the Moon from 1819, which he saw before he wrote the play on a visit to Dresden in 1937. In this earlier painting one of the men seems to be leaning on the other for support. In both paintings the figures seem small and vulnerable in the dark landscape and against the immense sky.
Another possible visual inspiration for the play might be Jack B Yeats’s 1942 painting Two Travellers, which shows two men walking on a country path or road in an otherwise empty, dramatically painted landscape. Beckett was friendly with Yeats and may have seen the painting in the artist’s studio in Dublin, or at the Tate Gallery in London after the war.
In these works one can see the germ of the idea of two figures alone in an empty landscape, reliant only on each other. The images of the moonlit night are echoed when the moon rises at the end of each act of the play.
Of course, Beckett’s conception of the landscape is not naturalistic, reduced as Matt pointed out in our conversation to the basic elements of sky, stone and vegetation as represented by the lone tree. The tree has always been an iconic feature of the set for Godot. In the very first production in the Theatre Babylon in Paris, the director Roger Blin designed and constructed the tree by wrapping crepe paper around a wire frame, which was then stuck into a block of foam rubber. A suitably unassuming image. The stage and the characters were then lit from above, creating one imagines a starkly atmospheric setting. By the time the play was revived in Paris in 1961 at the grand Odeon Theatre de France in Paris, the tree was designed and sculpted by none other than Alberto Giacometti, who was a friend of Beckett’s.
Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson, describes how “Beckett and Giacometti stood for hours on either side of the tree contemplating how the plaster leaves that Giacometti had also sculpted could best be fixed on for the beginning of the second act. After the production, Giacometti is said to have presented one of the leaves to Beckett.”
I love the idea of Giacometti’s tree, because by association I can also imagine his drawing or sculpting the figures of Vladimir and Estragon in his trademark etiolated form, which always imbues them with an existential isolation.
Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon
by Caspar David Friedrich, 1824
Two Men Contemplating the Moon
by Caspar David Friedrich, 1819
Influences from the war
We talked in the podcast about the influence that Beckett’s experience in the second world war would have had on his conception of the play. As Matt pointed out, he would have been familiar with the physical devastation caused by the bombing of parts of France and Europe. He also would have been aware of the atrocities of the concentration camps, which must have fed into his portrayal of the casual violence in the play: Pozzo’s brutality to Lucky, or Estragon’s nightly anonymous beatings. In fact, in an early draft of the play, he named one the tramps Levy, which has a more specific Jewish association. His removing any implicit link to the Jews foreshadows what became a deliberate technique of his, which he labelled “vaguen”, a word he himself coined to describe his process of removing specific references to make the whole more vague. The character names that he did use in the end, including the diminutives for Vladimir – Didi, and Estragon – Gogo, along with Pozzo and Lucky, are more like those of circus clowns.
It is hard not to think of the war dead when Estragon urges Vladimir to keep talking, “so we won’t hear…all the dead voices.” Vladimir later refers to a “charnel house” of “corpses”, and “To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help ringing in our ears”, cries from the past. That said, experiences Beckett knew of the war may also have inspired his presenting two people who continue to help each other to survive in the most desolate circumstances.
Lucky
Returning to the first production of the play, the director Roger Blin, who was also an actor, initially cast himself as Lucky, but when the first choice for Pozzo did not work out, he reluctantly assumed that role. He reportedly did not enjoy having to enact Pozzo’s cruelty. The recasting of Lucky turned out to be fortunate, because Jean Martin created a very affecting performance. In Martin’s preparation for the role, a friend told him about patients that trembled with Parkinson’s disease, and he incorporated that into his performance, trembling throughout and dripping saliva from his mouth. It must have been shocking to watch. In fact, in one early performance a group in the audience started whistling and shouting after Lucky’s extraordinary monologue, to the point that the curtain was dropped. These were the same crowd who then got involved in a fight at the interval, and left shortly thereafter. In an ironic twist, this controversy boosted the profile of the production and tickets subsequently sold out.
Tom Edden as Lucky
Theatre Royal Haymarket, November 2024
Photo by Marc Brenner
Waiting and Repetition
In our conversation in the podcast, Matt said that the play was essentially about waiting. That may sound glib, given that that is the defined action of the play as spelled out in the title. But Matt also talked about how we in the audience collectively join in the waiting, because we are left waiting for something to happen, for logical explanations, for progress or resolution. Beckett said “all theatre is waiting” – waiting together in a live space to share events that we expect to become a story and agree on meaning about. In the play waiting becomes a metaphor for our seeking meaning and purpose in life most generally. Vladimir and Estragon’s lack of progress or change in their circumstances, suggests a nihilistic view of our search for meaning. All they have to sustain them is each other, and some extraordinary will to keep carrying on.
We talked also about how the ambiguity over their sense of time as it passes in the play underlines the lack of change. As does the repeating rhythms of events and language. According to the stage direction in the text, the second act takes place the “Next day. Same time. Same place.” A number of the same events are played out again: Estragon has been beaten again, he fusses about his boots, Pozzo and Lucky reappear, they talk about hanging themselves, a boy appears, and the moon rises. They decide to go, but do not move. It is not however, a circular repetition, even if there is some doubt about their memories or what day it is. With the small variations in these events, it feels like there is a linear movement forward. One akin however to Shakespeare’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” As Matt rightly said, Vladimir and Estragon would come back for a third act, which would be much the same as the previous two.
The waiting, the repetition, and the helplessness are why a production of the play performed in 1954 by prisoners in a prison near Wuppertal in Germany was so affecting. The story of this production is told in Knowlson’s biography. One of the prisoners had heard about this play that was taking Paris by storm and had a friend send him a copy, which he himself translated from the French into German. He obtained permission to put the play on, and according to Knowlson, the effect on the prisoners was electric. The prisoner wrote to Beckett, “Your Godot was our Godot”, explaining that every inmate saw himself reflected in the characters, who were also waiting for something to give their life meaning. He also echoed the point that is often overlooked in the bleakness of these characters’ predicament: “We are all waiting for Godot and do not know that he is already here. Yes, here. Godot is my neighbour in the cell next to mine. Let us do something to help him then, change the shoes that are hurting him!” The pastor of the prison also apparently kept the tree used in the production, writing to Beckett, that for him it was “a tree of life.” Matt suggested in the podcast that the enduring power of the play is that it can have different meanings to people in different contexts and times. This story is a moving testament to the universality of Beckett’s vision, and particularly the humane bonds between the characters that finally keep them going on together.
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112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
thanks .