The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Apr. 30, 1956

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Waiting for Godot, by 50-year-old Irish-born Samuel Beckett, who was once a sort of secretary to James Joyce, is one more of those writings that pose philosophic question marks with the emphasis of exclamation points. Like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Kafka's The Castle and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Waiting for Godot makes who's who—and sometimes what's what—a kind of guessing game.

So simple as to be almost nonexistent is Beckett's tale of two penniless, hapless, smelly tramps waiting, in a barren countryside, for a neighborhood personage named Godot. They chatter, gnaw carrots, tug at a tight shoe, talk of going separate ways and of hanging themselves, encounter a rich, unhappy magnate driving his servant before him as with whips. At the end of Act 1, a boy arrives to say that Godot cannot come that night but will the next. The next night, after further waiting and talking, a boy arrives to say that again Godot cannot come. As before, the tramps decide to go away; as before, they then merely stand stock-still.

With its lost, disconsolate, straw-clutching outcasts, its bullying and later blinded magnate, its endless rain of symbolic and allegorical smallshot, its scarred and almost sceneryless universe, Waiting for Godot can be most variously interpreted—somewhat after the fashion of the blind men and the elephant. Under Godot's metaphysical counterpane, believing Christian, doubting pessimist, left-winger and existentialist can all find reasons to nestle for warmth. But whether Godot stands for God or simply for man's unconquerable hope, whether Waiting for Godot is a philosophic depth bomb or a theatrical dud, clearly the play has not a casual but a thematic plotlessness, and not an unintentional but a planned garrulity.

Beckett's firm control over his material is a possible key to appraising his achievement, and to rescuing his play from both philistine splutters and arty rhapsodizing. For what Beckett brings to his posing of generally impalpable and major truths is a genuine but essentially minor talent. He has a gift for the theatricality of nothing happening, for small sudden changes of key, for the humor of despair. For all its vernacular and even outhouse touches, his is an artificial and sophisticated style, a succinct loquacity. At bottom, Godot is both a neatly fingered exercise in wit and a pointillist rendering of humanity's dark-forest moods. But its very neatness gives it rather a symbolic rat-tat-rat than something that reverberantly makes great gashes and rents. Beckett's method dispenses with the usual stage clothing, but hardly to get closer to nakedness, for nakedness implies flesh, and Godot very often seems ghostly. The best symbolic works, from Moby Dick or Don Quixote down, never wear their symbolism on their sleeves; the symbolism brings added depth and resonance to an always three-dimensional creation. Godot lacks any large creativeness; Beckett suffers a little himself from the blight that constitutes his theme and subject-matter.