Most strikingly, Beckett, like other dramatists working in this mode, is not trying to "tell a story." He's not offering any easily identifiable solutions to carefully observed problems; there's little by way of moralizing and no obvious "message." The circularity of Waiting for Godot is highly unconventional. Even today, it's not what we expect at all. But it's very common in the tradition of the theater of the absurd.

Martin Esslin writes very lucidly about how the theater of the absurd works like poetry rather than narrative. Traditional narrative drama tells a story, develops dynamically. The characters grow and change before our eyes, and that is the point of the story-to reveal that growth, that change. We reflect on why it happened, what it implies, how we relate to it ourselves, what it means. But the theater of the absurd doesn't aim for traditional narrative because it rejects such narratives as too artificial, too contrived. The world isn't really as neat and tidy as all that. Things happen by chance, at random. Chaos and irrationality describe reality better than rationality and order. So the aim is not to create artificially causal plots, but to reveal for audiences a powerful image, which can be literal, metaphorical, analogical, or allegorical-like poetry. The ambiguity of the poetic image, then, replaces the dynamic development of traditional narrative in theater of the absurd. The image Waiting for Godot evokes, then, is poetic and lyrical in essence rather than narrative; like a lot of theater of the absurd, it's both tragic and comic in nature. The play is therefore referred to as a tragicomedy, or "black comedy." The tragedy is the futility-Vladimir's desperation, his growing awareness of the absurdity of his situation; Gogo's frustrated desire to leave. The comedy is everything else.

In Beckett's work, too, we are aware of how the imagery (everything from plot to character to dialogue to set) is characteristically stripped to bare essences. His plays take on an abstract quality which many compare to a kind of abstract expressionism for the theater.

So we come back around to the question: why are these artists so unconventional? Why be abstract? Why not tell a story in the traditional way? Martin Esslin takes up this question in Absurd Drama (Penguin, 1965):

Why should the emphasis in drama have shifted away from traditional forms towards images which, complex and suggestive as they may be, must necessarily lack the final clarity of definition, the neat resolutions we have been used to expect? Clearly because the playwrights concerned no longer believe in the possibility of such neatness of resolution. They are indeed chiefly concerned with expressing a sense of wonder, of incomprehension, and at times of despair, at the lack of cohesion and meaning that they find in the world. If they could believe in clearly defined motivations, acceptable solutions, settlements of conflict in tidily tied up endings, these dramatists would certainly not eschew them. But, quite obviously, they have no faith in the existence of so rational and well ordered a universe. The "well-made play" can thus be seen as conditioned by clear and comforting beliefs, a stable scale of values, an ethical system in full working condition. The system of values, the world-view behind the well-made play may be a religious one or a political one; it may be an implicit belief in the goodness and perfectibility of men (as in Shaw or Ibsen) or it may be a mere unthinking acceptance of the moral and political status quo (as in most drawing-room comedy). But whatever it is, the basis of the well-made play is the implicit assumption that the world does make sense, that reality is solid and secure, all outlines clear, all ends apparent. The plays that we have classed under the label of the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, express a sense of shock at the absence, the loss of any such clear and well-defined systems of beliefs or values.

Bottom line: these artists have lost faith in a well ordered, rational universe. The world is a place where things happen randomly, by chance. You live or you die by chance. The conditions you endure, you endure by chance. There is no well-crafted plan, no scheme of justice by which the universe operates.

Recall the Dante we found in Canto I of the Inferno. He was lost in just such a dark wood of meaninglessness. Didi and Gogo are equally lost in a dark wood, but Godot, unlike Virgil, never arrives.

NIHILISM and EXISTENTIALISM

Nihilism is a radical philosophy of meaninglessness. Wikipedia tells us that it is a "belief in nothing." The world and all the humans in it exist without meaning, purpose, truth, or value. Any system of belief, or artistic expression, that denies or drains away meaning can be described as "nihilistic." Nietzsche famously accused Christianity of being a nihilistic religion because it drained meaning away from earthly life and kept its followers focused on a hope-for afterlife. His declaration that "God is dead" reverberated throughout the 20th century.

It's not too hard to understand why nihilistic philosophy, which eventually gave way to a very un-nihilistic existentialism, threatened to overwhelm us in the mid-20th century. The waning of religious faith which really began in the Enlightenment and grew even stronger with the steady rise in our faith in the sciences was helped along by the brilliance of Nietzsche and the horrors of the Holocaust. The devastation of WWI put a huge damper on the liberal ideals of secular social progress, and revolutionary movements like communism lost a lot of steam in the wake of Stalin's totalitarianism. Hitler had plunged Europe into barbarism and genocide, justifying mass murder as the "civilized thing to do." Atomic bombs demonstrated how fragile and insignificant human life could be. In the prosperous West, a kind of spiritual emptiness descended. Under these conditions, nihilistic philosophy and art flourished.

Existentialism is a progressive step up from nihilism, because whereas the nihilist asserts meaninglessness out there and leaves it at that (justifying any behavior at all), the existentialist asserts meaninglessness (out there) but goes on to assert that it's the responsibility of the individual to create meaning (in here)-that to create meaning, as Dante created The Divine Comedy to rescue his world from meaninglessness, is our human purpose. Of course it's more complex than that, but that's a bird's eye view of their relationship.

A thoughtful question to ask of Waiting for Godot is whether it expresses a nihilistic or existentialist perspective. And to kick that into high gear, you could ask whether or not it is a postmodern play.

SET

What do you expect from a set when you go to the theater? How does Beckett's set defy your expectations? What's the purpose, do you think, of his unconventional approach to setting?

As precise as Beckett is in his set directions, and as spare as the stage is obviously supposed to be, there is still plenty of room for individual directors to interpret the setting in various ways. For instance, the following two sets are vastly different from the one you saw in the Beckett on Film production.

Here's a set which appeared in a 1970 production at the Landestheater in Salzburg in Austria:

And here theater critic Joanne Klein describes the set used in the Studio Theater production in Washington, D.C. in 1998:

Russell Metheny's set design situated Beckett's vagrants in an environment that announced urban cataclysm ….In the sparsely articulated parking lot of a long abandoned drive-in movie site, Beckett's blasted tree shared the stage with a heap of shredded rubber (rubble?)…. Framed against the backdrop of a slightly askew, artfully corroded drive-in movie screen….

How important is setting to your understanding of the play? How do you think the different stages influence how you understand what's happening in the play?

• The Salzburg set suggests some kind of grand statement, because the setting seems grand. It's a grand stage all set for a grand tragedy. You might find the play more than a little ironic in such a setting. The tragedy may seem more like tragicomedy. Notice the mirror at stage rear-what a great touch!
• The Washington set brings the setting closer to home and makes it feel more "realistic." It takes the play out of its surrealistic, dystopian, dream space and places us somewhere immediately identifiable. Suddenly we've seen these two tramps before; in fact we see them every day on East Market in downtown West Chester, by the Salvation Army shelter.
• The "Beckett on Film" set is less grand than the Salzburg stage and less realistic than the Washington one; instead it opts for the sparseness of Beckett's script: a country road, a tree. The road and the tree are surrounded by mounds of rubble on which nothing grows in the first act, and a little green appears in the second. The set evokes a deadened, blasted landscape (War torn? Over-plowed? Desert? High altitude?) that struggles for growth and renewal despite its devastation.

Each of these sets seeks to amplify some aspect of the play's meaning, or reinforce its impact. Individual directors can pursue different interpretations of the play, which leads to each production being unique in its own right. That is the magic of the theater.

SOUND

• In the film as in the theater there is no musical accompaniment. You might have noticed that in the film there was no music soundtrack. That probably seemed very odd to you, even if you didn't think about it consciously. What was the effect of the lack of a music track?
• The effect most evident is that we hear the silences, which are an important part of the play's imagery. The characters are always trying to fill the silence, which seems to represent some kind of intolerable void. Silence as void, as nothingness, is too disturbing, so they talk and talk ceaselessly to cover up their awareness of this scary, soul-crushing silence. There's no music of the spheres to attend to in Waiting for Godot. But although the characters battle the silence again and again, Beckett seems intent for us, the audience, to hear it, experience it, think about it, feel it. The play creates several vivid images of silence.
• Michael Worton, in "Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theater as Text" observes the multifaceted silences in Waiting for Godot, noting the "silences of inadequacy, when characters can't find the words they need; silences of repression, when they are struck dumb by the attitude their interlocutor or by their sense that they might be breaking a social taboo; and the silences of anticipation, when they await the response of the other which will give them a temporary sense of existence." In all of these ways, Beckett makes "silence communicate."

LIGHTING

The one lighting effect is when day turns rapidly to night and the moon rises. The surrealistic, dreamlike effect of this heightened change from day to night amplifies the theme of uncertain time.

ALLUSION

Several biblical references enter the play, but some of the allusions that are less obvious are literary ones.

At the end of ACT I, Gogo's comment about the moon alludes to a Shelley lyric:

"To the Moon" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I
AND, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The mood arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass.

II
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Shelley's poetry continues to reverberate in ACT II. These allusions are some of the play's very few external references. Macbeth later echoes faintly, but distinctly, in Pozzo's speech about the brevity and apparent meaninglessness of existence; are we suspended for one flickering instant between the birth canal and the grave? These references let us know that Gogo really was a poet, that these were educated men. Here's the relevant passage from Macbeth (V,v:10-30):

MACBETH: I have almost forgot the taste of fears;
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me.

[Re-enter SEYTON]

Wherefore was that cry?

SEYTON The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.