In fact, the pair went five nights in a row. There seemed to be a method to this madness, but it was one the playwright could not explain.īeckett attended the London production in 1955 with Alan Schneider, who was readying the American tryout. Worst of all was a skintight rubber wig (“one of my major miseries”) that Ball was forced to wear beneath his bald hat, even though his bald, babylike head was only glimpsed for a few seconds. To add indignity to insult, Beckett had burdened Bull’s character, Pozzo, with bulky props and ticky-tack costume elements: an enormous overcoat, a giant watch, a pipe that must be stuffed and smoked, opera glasses, and most importantly a gigantic rope that rubbed his hands raw.
On opening night, the cast made the mistake of skipping four pages in the script-and then the even greater mistake of going back and starting the scene over again. Moreover, his text was filled with so many repetitions and identical cues that it proved extremely difficult to memorize. Beckett didn’t show up until late in rehearsals, and he was of no use to the actors whatsoever. Peter Bull, the first English-language Pozzo, described rehearsals as “gloomy affairs” and the process as the most grueling of his career. The play has proven similarly mystifying to performers. The sentence cited by Beckett is actually not in Augustine but in The Repentance of Robert Greene, printed in 1592 along with Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, which included the already-dead author’s famous attack on Shakespeare as an “upstart crow, beautified with out feathers.” Do not presume one of the thieves was damned.” That sentence has a wonderful shape.It is the shape that matters.” The reference is to the parable of the two thieves crucified alongside Christ, but Beckett seems to tease the association only to disavow it.
There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: “Do not despair one of the thieves was saved. “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.” Speaking to the London Critic Harold Hobson, Beckett was similarly cryptic: “Haven’t really the foggiest idea what some of it means,” said Peter Hall, the play’s first English director, during rehearsals in 1955, “but if we stop and discuss every line we’ll never open.” When the American director Alan Schneider asked Beckett, “Who or what does Godot mean?”, in reference to the mysterious unnamed character at the center (or perhaps the central absence) of the play, the infamously reticent playwright demurred.
There has perhaps never been a play so resistant to symbolic interpretations-so insistent on its simple, concrete, theatrical reality-and yet more inviting of them, than Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
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