Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot can be seen as a play that belongs to the Theatre of Absurd genre. The two acts in the play have the same setting, almost the same action takes place and they consist of similar dialogues, both acts take place in the same country road with a tree. In a current production at Theatre Royal Haymarket, Vladimir, played by Patrick Stewart, and Estragen, played by Ian McKellen, exchange meaningless words, Lucky and Pozzo pass by and then a little boy comes with a message from Godot and walks away.
The way the characters are presented, makes it difficult to relate them to anyone the audience might know. The play doesn’t have a clear beginning or an end. It begins with Vladimir and Estragon as ‘waiting’ but we are not told when this wait begun. When the play comes to an end we are not given any inclination of when this ‘waiting’ will end.
The dialogues presented in the play are almost always incoherent rumblings of the characters. A good example of this would be the moment in which Lucky is asked to think. If we look at the current Theatre Royal Haymarket production we can see that when Lucky is thinking his is speaking so fast without a break in the sentence and saying so many random things that it is impossible to make any sense of what he is saying and it’s obvious Becket wanted this section to be performed in this way as there are no punctuation marks present in the text.
The Tree of Life from the Bible
The setting of the play is on a country road by a tree without leaves then with leaves in Act Two. From this we can’t be sure where the road is. It could be anywhere. By writing in this style Beckett avoids from giving the play a clear social and historical context. However due to the way the human mind works the audience is always trying to find meaning while watching or reading the play and this results in the audience finding resonances with specific historical and social contexts.
For example the barren setting draws the attention of the audience to the tree. This tree can be seen as an obvious religious symbol. It brings about images of the tree of life from the Bible, the tree of knowledge, the tree that Judas used to hung himself, the fig tree that Christ cursed for its luck of bearing fruit. Also to some degree it can be seen as being Jesus’ cross as the cross is sometimes referred in the Bible as being a tree.
These associations with biblical images together with the fact that in act one the tree is dead and then in act two it miraculously comes to life bearing a few leaves seems to parallel the death of Jesus and his resurrection. Just from this we can see that there is a Christian element to the play. There are other layers in the play that bring about images of social and historical contexts, amongst these are the holocaust, the two world wars and social class divides.
Even though the audience finds resonances with the social and historical contexts Beckett clearly stays away from attaching the play to any historical or cultural context. This makes the experience of Vladimir and Estragon universal. The backdrop of the play is left unspecified and this is what makes the action of the play seem to be a universal situation rather than an event that happened to particular specific characters. As a result of this universal element of the play the audience can relate it to many different social and historical contexts.
