Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

This play was performed today by our wonderful second year students who were exploring the ways in which Beckett was pushing the boundaries of English language along a continuum that had begun with Joseph Conrad, The poets of the First World War, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and George Orwell. Beckett comes at the end of this line of creative artists who were exploring ways in which the creative re-invigoration of the English language might be a force for healing the world of its mechanistic slide into the abyss! Too dramatic? Maybe! But at all events these writers and artists were experimenting with ways in which the human brain could be channelled, redirected into a condition of harmony rather than dissolution. And Beckett does this by dramatizing the process of dissolution itself and then, seemingly, reaching beyond this. His play has a shock value that forces us to recognise the circularity of our own thinking and feeling, the need we have for a dramatic change in the mechanical processes of our own thinking….

Here is a wonderful lecture on this topic by Professor Belinda Jack given recently at the Gresham College in London: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/theatre-and-language-samuel-beckett-waiting-for-godot