SAMUEL BECKETT'S 'WAITING FOR GODOT' PREMIERE

Today, The Grandma has been reading Waiting for Godot, the play written by Samuel Beckett, that was premiered in Paris on a day like today in 1953.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. 

He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) a tragicomedy in two acts.

The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. The premiere, directed by Roger Blin, was on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the most significant English-language play of the 20th century.

More information: Samuel Beckett, the Irish Avant-Garde Writer

There is only one scene throughout both acts. Two men are waiting on a country road by a tree. The men are of unspecified origin, though it is clear that they are not English by nationality since they refer to currency as francs, and tell derisive jokes about the English -and in English-language productions the pair are traditionally played with Irish accents. 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.

Beckett received numerous requests to adapt Waiting for Godot for film and television. The author, however, resisted these offers, except for occasional approval out of friendship or sympathy for the person making the request.

Although not his favourite amongst his plays, Waiting for Godot was the work which brought Beckett fame and financial stability and as such it always held a special place in his affections. When the manuscript and rare books dealer, Henry Wenning, asked him if he could sell the original French manuscript for him, Beckett replied: Rightly or wrongly have decided not to let Godot go yet. Neither sentimental nor financial, probably peak of market now and never such an offer. Can't explain.

More information: EDisciplinas

Every word is like an unnecessary stain
on silence and nothingness.

Samuel Beckett

SAMUEL BECKETT: THE IRISH AVANT-GARDE WRITER

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing, which, in new forms for the novel and drama, in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

More information: Samuel Beckett Resources

The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926. Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast. 

Beckett travelled in Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot. 

Samuel Beckett and his wife, Suzanne

In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it, it was eventually published in 1992. Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.

After the Nazi German occupation of France in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance, in which he worked as a courier. On several occasions over the next two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. There he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Catalan Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work in later life.

More information: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy

Beckett was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would refer to his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff". While in hiding in Roussillon, he continued work on the novel Watt, begun in 1941 and completed in 1945, but not published until 1953, though an extract had appeared in the Dublin literary periodical Envoy.

Samuel Beckett's Works

In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. The 1960s was a period of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and as a writer. 

 

In 1961, he married Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in a secret civil ceremony in England, its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law. In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem What is the Word, Comment dire. The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life.

Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Beckett died on 22 December. The two were interred together in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be any colour, so long as it's grey.

Download Words on Plays by Samuel Beckett

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. 

Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. 

Samuel Beckett