Godot Revisited

By T.E.K.

Let's take a deep deep breath and then say it. As a dramatist, Samuel Beckett can be, and frequently is, a crashing bore. His world-renowned play Waiting tor Godot has been called a masterpiece so repeatedly that any revival of it seems to come gift-wrapped in its exalted reputation. In the canon of dramatic literature, Godot is an original stunt, a clever game, but no masterpiece. It has spoken to the inner spirit of an age that is antiheroic, narcissistic, self-pitying, and prone to believe that man's journey through life is a pointless shuttle from nothing to nowhere. When that view of man alters, the vogue for Beckett will end. And the view will alter, for man has never gone .through any extended period of history with such a dim, stunted opinion of himself and his destiny. During failures of nerve, men are simply catching their breath for the next onslaught on fate.

This is not to deny that Beckett is an extremely fine and sensitive writer who has distilled his private anguish into prose poetry. His novels may well prove durable. In drama, he is the apostle of anti-theater. Theater is concrete. Beckett tries to make it abstract. Theater is visceral. Beckett is cerebral. Drama is the imitation of action. Beckett dotes on stasis, anti-action.

"Less is more," Mies van der Rohe said, and even the architects are beginning to doubt it. In the theater less is less--and less, and less. The Age of Cool is a blight to the theater. Drama was born to be larger, more vivid and more intense than life. Beckett tells us that life is a drab, attenuated prelude to death. The vaudeville japes of the two tramps Didi and Gogo in Godot are supposedly the ways in which we all kill time before time kills us.

Cosmic Longings. Beckett is a defrauded priest, a God-intoxicated man who has joined some celestial A.A. If God did exist, Beckett would have to un-invent him so that he could carry on his distinctly Irish ritual, the wake. All of Beckett's plays are wakes for God. His desperate cosmic longings are deeply felt; but prolonged mourning, like anything else, does grow tedious. That is why Beckett is best in small doses. A brief cloudburst of tears like the one-acter, Krapp's Last Tape, is morosely refreshing, but a full-length downpour like Godot leaves one in a state of nihilistic depression.

The limits of the play are clear precisely because the current off-Broadway revival is as good as one can legitimately imagine. Man's parlous state on this spinning planet is beautifully rendered by Henderson Forsythe's Vladimir and Paul B. Price's Estragon. As the slave Lucky, Anthony Holland mimes with the aching dignity of a Marceau, though his master, Pozzo (Edward Winter) is a shade too Blimpish. This is Alan Schneider's finest piece of directing since Virginia Woolf--sentient, taut, sharp as the image in a jeweler's glass.

The faults lie in the play. MallaHne said that a poet "is a man who seeks solitude in order to sculpture his own tomb." Waiting for Godot is Beckett's tomb. Need it necessarily be ours?

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