Almanac of Story Tellers: Waiting for Godot

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books 

Today is the story of January 5th

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    It is the fifth day of the year, leaving 360 days remaining in 2023.

    On this date in 1953, the play Waiting for Godot premiered at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris.

   
    Originally written in French and titled En attendant Godoy by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, the play told the story of two men on a road waiting for the title character, who never appears. During the wait, the men talk and discuss their life, philosophies, and any possible reason for their existence, which they hope to learn from Godot.

    The innovative play was one of the first "theater of the absurd" works to be successful. The phrase was coined to describe certain plays and playwrights who seemed to agree with Albert Camus that human existence is essentially absurd and pointless. 

    The play is as minimalistic as one would expect from Beckett: Two acts play set in one scene, a bare field with a tree and (sometimes) a rock. Besides the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, a few others appear on stage: Pozzo and Lucky, and The Boy.

    Given that Beckett rarely talked about the play, interpretations have flourished: it was an allegory of the Cold War or an anti-British diatribe. It was interpreted as Freudian, existential, Christian, or autobiographical. 

    It's about the relationship between Beckett and fellow Irish writer James Joyce -- which may be fitting, given the old line that the difference between them was that Joyce left nothing out of his works, and Beckett put nothing in.

    Beckett, unsurprisingly, sometimes complained that most explanations and interpretations merely complicated the play.