Death and the Magician: ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett.
Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and Tommy Cooper
“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
Vladimir: Yes, yes, we’re magicians.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is a modernist existential masterpiece — a play that prompts many questions, and answers none of them. It is like the Hatter’s Tea Party and his riddle in Alice in Wonderland.
But whereas the greatest classical riddle was answered by Oedipus and both saved him from death at the claws of the beautiful but deadly Sphinx and made him into the wisest man in ancient Greek literature the riddle in Waiting for Godot which involves man/men (the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx) involves a whole play about waiting. But for what? Or who? And why? A prompt? Why not?
Written originally in French in 1948–49 it was premiered in 1953 in Paris. Ostensibly it is about two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) who engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting Godot, who never arrives. ‘And if he comes?’ one of Beckett’s tramps asks the other near the end of the play. ‘We’ll be saved’, the other…
