#Waiting for godot plot free

But, to act against hate speech is to sully free speech. The world order is simple and such: a Muslim boy can be penalised for walking home with a Hindu girl, even 250 million people protesting reforms impacting them can be termed as terrorists. No face protection? Six-inches distance gone to mush? Oh, the horror!Īnd collectively, the din of disarray grows louder: political chaos, suppressed civil liberties, religious intolerance, caste and gender violence, and growing social apathy. When memories come back to us, on social media or through simple nostalgia, we flinch or let out a nervous gasp thinking of concerts, theatres, live events olden days when one derived pleasure merely by being in crowded haunts. The feeling has calcified into a strangeness with both worlds - what was before, and what currently is. Individually, we are lonely and awkward convulsed by debilitating boredom, deprived of human connection, oscillating between work and sleep. This spectre of absurdity also forms a befitting background to our times, with both the personal and collective standing helplessly in clutter. There’s no groove to this rut - it just is. The rest of the play looks similar in its form: punctuated with cross-talks, bowler hat exchange routines, drinking songs, adults falling into a heap and getting back up. You know that!Įstragon: This is becoming really insignificant. It's black!Įstragon: I only like the pink ones. Vladimir: No, anyway you overdo it with your carrots.Įstragon: Then give me a radish. Vladimir: There are radishes and turnips. The cyclical structure takes the form of a “diminishing spiral”, where people, place, and things are perpetually running down. One can’t help agreeing with author Normand Berlin who declares that there is little beginning or ending to the play - it is all middle, twice. Days spurt ahead, dusk falls against the sky without graceful notice. The Theatre of the Absurd was thus fleshed out dwelling on time, habit, the human condition, and friendship in the barren fray. What people make of it is not my concern…” Beckett says at the get-go, when asked about the symbolism Godot may hold. The attitude fits with the winds of change in Western theatre, where the play itself makes the transition from modernism to postmodernism, “with its insistence on pastiche, parody and fragmentation”, as critic Michael Worton notes. It irked him, the insistence to impose meaning and allegorise a work of fiction deliberately trying to avoid definition. Of course, the idea of the play turning into a parable would have been to Beckett’s chagrin. Here, Beckett becomes a prophet of entropy, and Waiting for Godot a parable about stasis, waiting and isolation in a coronavirus limbo. In the face of this chaos, the play then makes for an intriguing read - where one can come to cope with being-in-time, and stay for the spectre of absurdity. The novelty of the pandemic might have worn off, but grief and exhaustion are beginning to take shape in unfathomed ways. The truth seems stranger than fiction more than ever - headlined by a bizarre, surreal state of affairs studded with lockdowns and restrictions, isolation and helplessness, loss and longing. There is plenty reason to pull Beckett's work out of the dust and air to an audience held captive by a pandemic. Taking a go at it now, in 2020, the motivation seems fairly conspicuous. Critic Vivian Mercer would tell you that interpretations reveal more about the interpreter than the play. Is there a meaning to this wait - a source, an end? Depends on who seeks answers. We get a sense that this has happened before, and it will happen again. Through it all, the waiting persists uneasy waiting, hopeless waiting. This remarkably clear sequence of events forms the plot of German playwright Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, written in the summer of 1952.

Vladimir and Estragon sing, dance, talk about boots and hats, philosophise, meet two other people, contemplate suicide, and do the same thing the next day.

They wait for someone named Godot to arrive. “Nothing to be done,” are the first words said, setting the tone of a play known famously for “nothing” happening twice. Two men quickly fill the scene Estragon sits, as Vladimir walks in jauntily.

An empty canvas, with the exception of a nondescript tree and road.