I don’t wish to be a bore, but this is how I opened a Godot critique several years ago, quoting an absurd Mailer:
WAITING FOR BECKETT
Subtitle: Any Godot Will Do)
by
Anthony Steyning
Tell him that you saw us… Didi pleads with the boy somewhere in the middle then gets reiterated just before the end, in Waiting for Godot—- easily the best line of the play. I first saw Godot some twenty years after it premiered in Paris: I didn’t understand it at all. Later on, I bought a paper-back copy of the work at W.H. Smith in Montreal, reading the play over and over again, still not understanding a bloody word. I was in my late twenties then, and mightily pissed off with myself for not fathoming a famous piece of work, praised by critics the world over, inquiring timidly about its meaning among Irish friends, all literate theatre buffs, who spewed out near mystical explanations that also went over my head. Certainly the work is noble, tender, a Buster Keaton stone-face burlesque show, containing great lines like Thank you for your society, and something or other Gives us the feeling that we exist…which I now know to be a common French colloquialism.
Pretty stuff, all of it, and not as such beyond my reach, but still, at the time I miserably continued not getting the whole of it. I remember people like Eric Bentley calling Beckett’s Godot a masterful creation, the quintessence of existentialism. And a Norman Mailer statement to the effect that Beckett had sexually(!) re-established Christianity. Despite those nonsensical contradictions I pretended I believed both of these chaps, just to be on the safe side. But as it turns out they were as flabbergasted as I was that a staged, moving, plotless tableau mesmerized, inventing those crazy descriptions of the work only to cover up their own pathetic befuddlement. Maybe someone’ll sexually re-establish Christianity on stage tonight. Wanna come?
But now thirty years on, on a recent visit to Canada, and thanks to a PBS channel in my hotel room, during a broadcast celebrating etc etc
Need I say more?
