Waiting for Godot is, as the saying goes, a play in which nothing happens, twice. Two men, old acquaintances, spend a day waiting for someone named Godot – a man? God? Absolution? Nothing? – who never arrives. Instead, they encounter a strange, imperious man and his enslaved companion, then a boy who assures: tomorrow, Godot will come. The next day the same, almost.
Samuel Beckett’s modernist masterpiece, one of the most influential and widely performed plays in the English language, disorients the viewer by disassembling theater down to its essentials: performance and interpretation, which even the most seasoned Godot veterans are still debating. The play’s nonsensical ramblings, existentialist themes and lack of clear meaning have absorbed the absurd realities of places ravaged by prolonged, costly waiting – war-torn Sarajevo, post-Katrina New Orleans, or US prisons – as well as Broadway, subject to increasingly ludicrous demands of celebrity, money and buzz to survive.
