Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett is the most important playwriter of the theatre of absurdity, which spreads in the
second part of the 20th century.
He is an Irish playwriter, and he was born in 1906 in Dublin, he attended the Trinity College and he
studying modern languages such as French and Italian. In 1937 he moved to Paris, where he lived
most of his life, and he started his literary career as a writer, short-story writer and novelist.
In 1952 he wrote his most important play “Waiting for Godot”.
In 1969 he was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature and he died in 1989.
His main important work is Waiting for Godot in 1952 in Paris written in French and later
translated into English in 1954.
His main works: Endgame (1958) Krapp’s Last Tape (1959) Happy Days (1961) Breath (1970)
This theatre is completely different from the Victorian theatre, such as Wilde’s theatre. In fact, it
was characterized by the assent of whether kind of values, and religious belief. The destruction of
the certainties and basic assumptions of the Victorian Age, swept away by two world wars. The
mistrust in rationalism as a means to explain reality.
All the traditional features of a play have disappeared in the theatre of the absurd, for example
there’s the absent of a real plot, so, there are no events in the play. But what is performed is just the
absurdity of human life. So, we can say there is not actions, since what happens on the stage is
meaningless also the value of language is reduced, there aren’t dialogues, like in Wilde’s plays, and
as matter of fact dialogues were replayed by pauses and silences, miming and farcical situations
which reflected a sense of anguish. Vagueness about time, place and the characters. The value of
language is reduced. Incoherent babbling made up the dialogue.
The main themes of this theatre are the sense of man’s alienation, the cruelty of human life, the
absence or the futility of objectives and the meaningless of human life. According to the theatre of
the absurd in life there are not values and no meanings.
Waiting for Godot 1952 is the most important play written by Beckett. The plot is very simple as
nothing actually happens in the seen. The main protagonists are waiting for Godot, a character who
will never appear on the stage, so we are wondering about who Godot is. Nobody could answer this
question. Samuel Beckett himself said “If I knew what it meant I would have saidso in the play”
Probably the name Godot is composed of two part, the first makes references to god, and the second
part probably is the French name for Charles Chaplin, Charlot. That’s might be an explanation for
its name.
Metaphorically, Godot can represent the answer to all our questions or problems, but also, he could
stand for something which will change our lives. But, since Godot never appears in the play, the
question remains open. So, everyone is allowed to have their own interpretation.
This play is unconventional, so, it’s very different from Victorian plays, as the most important
features of a play are reversed: there is not plot, nothing happens; so, the plot consist of waiting for
Godot. As regarded the setting in place we can see there is no setting, but just a desolate country
road divided into two halves by a bare tree. (Corrispettivo del flusso di coscienza nel romanzo,
capovolgono le caratteristiche del teatro)
Theme: the static situation of waiting. Plot: the two tramps are waiting for a mysterious Godot, who
never turns up.
The play is set in the evening, and the characters belong to no social class, so they do not belong to
upper middle class, like Wilde’s characters, but they are just two tramps, whose name are Vladimir
and Estragon, and they are the main characters, and then there are other two characters, who are
stabbing Lucky and Pozzo, the secondary characters. And they are linked to each other by a
relationship of master-slave.
