Professor David Peimer
Samuel Beckett’s Life and Plays

Professor David Peimer | Samuel Beckett’s Life and Plays | 07.17.21

- Let’s just say welcome to everybody. I’m so sorry that you have to listen to our personal conversation. We welcome you back to Lockdown University. We’re just reminiscing. I’m sure many of you…

• Were relating to what we’re doing, and we’re very lucky to have David with us today, so thank you David, over to you.

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• Okay. Thanks so much, Wendy, and take care there. Okay. Hi, everybody, and welcome, and hope everyone is well wherever you are. Here, it’s boiling hot in little England, so it’s a nice welcome change. Okay, so I’m going to talk today about, as you know, on Samuel Beckett, and some aspects of his life, and in particular, “Waiting for Godot”, the great remarkable play that I’m sure everybody knows. And I’m going to also talk about Beckett’s life and his sense of humour because I think it’s very underrated, the connection between his life, his humour, his sense of irony in his work and in his life. As we all know, there’s a strange mystique, as if he was so alienated and so anxious and neurotic and so on.

But I think there’s a very different character that emerges when we look at his life and when we look at the play, and I’m going to focus on Godot in particular. Just as a short little personal anecdote, “Waiting for Godot” is the only play that my father ever mentioned, besides one or two, a couple of Shakespeare’s, when I was growing up. And it was always interesting to me, he didn’t have a particular special interest in theatre and so on, but was fascinated with Shakespeare. But Godot was the only other play that had seemed to have made a real impact when growing up in good old Durban, so it stuck with me for a long time before and afterwards.

And just one or two little stories, Athol Fugard went to see Beckett and they just ended up talking about rugby and cricket, which obviously, in Ireland, is huge. They didn’t talk about theatre, or Apartheid or South Africa, or the war, or anything else. I want to try and personalise because I think there’s far more of his character as a human being, as a writer, in his work. And some people, some scholars are recently starting to make that connection more and more through new biographies emerging. What’s fascinating about him, he never wrote a play about war, or great love stories, or great war stories, or battles. He never wrote those sort of apparent, huge, epic type of theatre plays. He began an entirely different approach to theatre, basically directly after the Second World War, which has been taken up globally by so many playwrights, novelists, short stories, et cetera, just writers.

The influence is extraordinary and the scope of the influence is really global. And how he pulled himself away from the influence of James Joyce is also fascinating. And I’m going to mention his relationship with Jews and the Holocaust ‘cause we can never forget, and I’m going to talk about what he did during the war, and his relationship with Jewish friends and Jewish people that he knew. That will come in. First, a brief bio. Beckett was born in 1906 and then died here in 1989. And he was always anxious that because his parents had died fairly young, that his health would suffer, he would die young, and so on. And interestingly, just I think by chance, he started eating fish very early because of the history of heart disease. But in those days, I don’t think it was really that well researched. I could be wrong. And he ate fish basically for most of his adult life. Whether that links to his longevity, we don’t know.

He gets a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, one of the very few playwrights to win the Nobel Prize. It’s hardly ever given to playwrights. O'Neill, Beckett. And so, it’s so minimal that it’s an extraordinary achievement for a writer. He wrote plays, poetry, short stories, novels, he was a translator, English into French, French to English, and so on, spoke a few languages, lived in Paris for most of his adult life. And interestingly, after the war, he started to write in French and then would translate it into English. And according to sources, the French he wrote it in was slightly more stilted or slightly more visceral. And the translations differ actually, when you look closely at some of the words, and I’m going to link some of that to Godot when we look at it.

On his bio, he talks about Godot as being a tragicomedy. And that’s so important. Tragicomedy, it’s meant to be a comedy with tragedy, which I think so many productions miss. And I’m going to show some clips from the very first American production directed by the great Alan Schneider in the '50s in America. It was an amazing production with Zero Mostel and Burgess Meredith playing Vladimir and Estragon. Then I’m going to show a clip later after that from Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, who did a production in 2013. And then a fairly recent production about seven years, six or seven years ago, from Ireland, from Dublin.

I’ll show you some of those clips in a little while. The irony that he saw the world, if we like, in the absurd indifference of life. Beckett, he wrote in some of his diaries, which have emerged more and more in recent times in letters, when one just goes for a walk and looks at the sky or the sea, the absurd indifference, and I don’t mean it necessarily as a cruel indifference, but the absurd objective indifference of the world, of life, of nature, earth, sky. Faced with that, how does one choose to live? What purpose does one choose to have? And the importance of having a purpose, a passion, a driving force.

And I want you to link that to his life and to Godot in the plays 'cause I think it’s very understated, underwritten. Absurdism is closer to the Camus’ idea than Sartre, where Camus’ idea of absurd, if you take out a moral centre, or God as a centre for a belief, or a value system, or religion, or any other ideology, what then replaces it as a set of beliefs to live by? Of course, it’s thrown back on the self, but in Camus’ idea, it’s the propel, that is the trigger for action. And as we will see, Beckett was not a man who lacked action. The image in the popular imagination is quite different. And I’m going to talk about how, in his own time, from a historical perspective, there’s a lot of action and there’s a lot of engagement and interaction.

From a later western perspective, the influence of the philosophy of existentialism comes in, and he never once mentioned anything of identifying with it or saying he was. There’s a philosophical approach to understanding Beckett, and historical approach, and those are two very different contexts, and I want to try and ride two horses at once during today’s talk. He spoke about that his plays were meant to be comedy, the huge influence of Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, without what some have called “the sentimental side of Chaplin.” That’s a debate which I’m not going to get into.

The minimalism, as opposed to James Joyce, who wrote with as many words and the remarkable facility with language that Joyce had and celebration of it in that apparent structured stream of consciousness way. And how Beckett is absolutely minimalist, to cut, to reduce, to cut to the essence, the opposite of James Joyce, who he revered. He’s awarded the Nobel Prize. And it’s interesting, the citation. It’s said for his writing, “which shows in the destitution of modern man "how modern man may acquire his own elevation.” It’s a fascinating citation from the Nobel Prize Committee, the elevation of modern man by showing the destitution after the war.

Beckett is born in Dublin. His father’s a quantity surveyor of Huguenot descent and his mother, a nurse. He was raised as an Anglican, the Church of Ireland, as an Anglican, which is fascinating given one’s I suppose cliched perception sometimes of Catholicism in Ireland and so on. And he went to a very liberal school, which Oscar Wilde had gone to before. Very open-minded, school kids of all different ages, sorry, of all different backgrounds were encouraged. Very interesting at this time. Remember, this is obviously in the early 1900s.

He had came from a middle class family that they were not short of money and resource. They had a large garden, large house, tennis court. And he was a great, as he joked, he said, “I was the only cricketer,” ‘cause he was a professional cricketer for a while, “I was the only cricketer to win the Nobel Prize.” He played cricket, he played tennis, he was an active sportsman, physically active, and reached a very high level in cricket more than tennis, and he loved cricket. Then he goes to Trinity College in 1923 in Dublin, which is a fantastic university, studies literature, modern languages. He then goes to Paris.

He lectures there for two years and doesn’t want to do it. He wants to follow his purpose, his passion, as a writer. Crazy and ridiculous on one hand, but on the other hand, he chooses. In 1928, he goes and does some lecturing in Paris. He meets James Joyce. He works for him and with him. And he’s hugely influenced by Joyce. In 1929, he published essays on Proust, who I’m going to talk about in August, and another fascinating essay on Dante and Joyce. And his influence, the influence of Dante, stayed through all his life. Come back to that much later.

He had a relationship with Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, Lucia. And he ended it. And he wrote in a letter to a friend, he said, “I had to choose, should I go for curtains or scenes?” And Lucia Joyce for him was scenes, not curtains. He really had a theatrical imagination in his way of trying to understand, the one was full of passion and romance and fire, and the scenes, a calmer, more mature, perhaps, relationship. Lucia, Joyce’s daughter, was also profoundly, I suppose in contemporary terms, we would say that she had some mental health concerns. I don’t want to go into details of possible psychiatric definitions and so on. Very different then to now what they may mean or not.

He went back to Trinity to lecture in 1930, resigned in '31 as a final decision. He then goes to London and he has therapies with Dr. Bion. And I’m sure many people here in Lockdown will know of Bion. And he went for therapy for two years. Now, this is very important and little known because it emerges in his interactions with friends, his letters, his diaries, of the profound effect, because he had many, many, what we would call today, I guess, hypochondriacal conditions. He had boils, he had sores, he had some eczema, many very minimal but upsetting conditions for himself, and the stress and the anxiety, 'cause he was trying to make it as a writer, but he couldn’t get jobs, and he was in London and elsewhere, and the anxiety from a very controlling mother and a father who had died fairly young.

All of these things, and the therapy is really crucial, and he believed in therapy, and this is in the thirties, and he felt it had really helped him. He wrote his first novel, which received 43 rejection slips. Now, this is in the thirties, the early thirties, so unlike today, it’s not as if there’s thousands and thousands of publishing houses, or the internet, so 43 rejection slips, everyone, and it wasn’t just rejection, they were vile slatings, so crucified and pretty negative. But he carried on. He goes back to Paris. He still isn’t making it, he’s just, he’s working for Joyce as a bit of a secretary, he’s doing a bit of part-time teaching in English and so on, trying to write. He hasn’t done made anything.

He writes to Eisenstein in Moscow that he wants to study film. But interestingly, that letter was lost because there was a smallpox epidemic in parts of Russia at the time and Eisenstein had gone to try, like all of us have done in the last year and a half, to avoid the pandemic, or the epidemic, in Russia. He said he didn’t get the letter. In 1935, Beckett travels to Germany for nearly two years. He witnesses the Nazi savagery and the attitude and what’s happening with the Jews. He hates it. He writes about it in his diaries, appalled, the savagery, the barbarism, the words are so apparently un-Beckett. They are vicious attacks and you can feel an emotional, disturbing, and an emotional hate. I use that word carefully because Beckett was not a man to hate, as to what he saw happening with the Nazis and in particular the Jews.

He had many Jewish friends. Then he goes back to Paris and he’s back with Joyce. He meets and he mixes in the circle of intellectuals and writers and artists and painters of that time in Paris, the twenties and the thirties. He’s part of Duchamp, the remarkable conceptual artist, Sartre, Giacometti, who later designs some set for him, Joyce, and many others, Hemingway, and all the rest. He meets Peggy Guggenheim and he has a hot, powerful sexual relationship with her. Again, he says, “that was scenes, not curtains. "I think I better go for curtains.”

I’m not going to try the Irish accent and imitate Beckett. And I’m quoting, that’s Beckett’s phrase, not mine. And Peggy Guggenheim, of course, is, as we all know, this amazingly interesting lady. And he ends it with her, or she ends it, I’m not quite sure, but it doesn’t matter. 1938. In 1938, he’s in Paris and he’s walking down the street and a pimp by chance stabs him and misses his heart by a few inches. A lady called Suzanne, and I’m going to pronounce this wrong and I apologise, Dumesnil, Dumesnil, Suzanne happens to be walking past and helps him. He’s been stabbed a couple of inches away from the heart. He’s lying there bleeding. She gets the ambulance, et cetera, et cetera, he’s taken off, James Joyce pays for his hospital, and Suzanne comes almost every day to help him.

That’s the lady he ends up marrying and ends up being with for the rest of his life. As he said, again, you can imagine the phrase, I don’t need to repeat it. This is 1938, he’s nearly killed. Then the Nazis arrive, as we know, in 1940. Beckett joined the French resistance very early on, very shortly after the Nazis had beaten the French and had arrived in Paris, literally within a couple of weeks, three weeks apparently. And not many French had done that. And remember, he’s Irish, so he’s part of a neutral country. He’s got an Irish passport. He doesn’t have to do anything, he can live there, he can live anywhere, 'cause Ireland is neutral during the entire war, as we all know.

He joins the resistance within three weeks of the Nazis taking over Paris. And he works for the resistance, and he’s not just a minor figure, he’s a courier. He’s writing messages, translating them into English, and taking them to be transmitted by radio, which was the most dangerous, amongst the most dangerous part, the radio, back to London. He’s the courier and he’s the writer of messages from French to English so they’d get back to help POWs escape, to help watch German troop movements, and actively with the resistance to help with storing of weapons, ammunition, and so on. Then they’re betrayed by the priest who betrayed many in Paris, and as a result of the betrayal, it was part of the Gloria group.

And by the way, Beckett was also a member of the SOE, Special Operations Executive, which was the special commander unit set up by Churchill, and Churchill’s phrase, as I’m sure Trudy has told you, to set Europe ablaze. French resistance, Belgian, and so on all over Europe. And 12 of the, and Gloria unit was started by Jeanine Picabia, the daughter of Francis Picabia, the wonderful artist. These intellectuals and artists were very involved, a lot of them, not peripherally. And Beckett, in fact, had communication with SOE, which is pretty powerful. Let’s never forget, he’s got an Irish passport. He doesn’t have to do anything. They’re betrayed by this priest. 12 of them are shot immediately of the Gloria resistance group. And over 90 are, within a fairly short while, deported to the concentration camps and killed, murdered.

Beckett, he gets a quick message that the Gestapo are after him and Suzanne, and within literally a couple of hours, apparently three or four hours, they just go back to their apartment and they just get out and they start walking to the south, which is still an unoccupied division, to the south of the unoccupied parts of France. He escapes the Gestapo with his wife, Suzanne, within a couple of hours. They flee to, on foot, they’re walking, and this links to Godot, to the village of, and forgive my pronunciation, Roussillon. There, he works for the resistance again, storing weapons, and we’re talking about bullets and guns and bombs. He helps in sabotaging German transport with railways. He helps with shooting of Nazi soldiers.

He’s very actively involved in this whole thing. And if he was found or betrayed, again, he’d be murdered immediately. Then he, after the war, he’s awarded quite prestigious medals by de Gaulle and the French government after the war. He never spoke much about it until much later on in his life, until he was in his eighties. Okay, I’m going to link that to Godot in a little while. Then, also, Beckett, as a writer, he felt that he was always going to be under the shadow of Joyce, this remarkable figure of 20th century literature. Then he had what he called his own moment of insight, of epiphany. “I realised that Joyce had gone as far as a writer could. I realised that my own way was in taking away, in subtracting from words and sentences rather than adding.”

Now, that’s a huge shift in his thinking away from Joyce, who celebrates language, celebrates how language clothes ideas. Then it goes on in Krapp’s Last Tape, another brilliant play, where he writes, which is autobiographical, “it became clear to me at last that the dark, which I have always struggled to keep under, is in reality my most precious ally.” My dark is my precious ally. It’s not something I’m scared of or terrified, but it’s my precious ally as a writer, I’m going to embrace, I’m going to celebrate, I’m going to incorporate it, I’m not going to be terrified or freaked. And then, as Vivian Mercier, who was one of the first critics at the time, after Godot was staged in the early fifties, 1953, in Paris, that he, “Beckett had achieved a theoretical impossibility, a play in which nothing happens twice.” Lovely phrase.

When it was staged, it was a success in Paris early on, in London not. It was a success in America with Alan Schneider’s production, Germany, and globally. He gets a Nobel Prize, that I mentioned, in '69. And when he died, there was only a copy of one book, “Dante’s Inferno”, next to the bed. And some of the phrases from Godot, “you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that”, said with an ironic, humorous self-awareness, you could always imagine Laurel and Hardy, or if Buster Keaton had spoken some of these comics. “There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” The way of putting together a general philosophical idea with a very specific concrete actor’s phrase, a character’s phrase.

That, for me, is part of the brilliance of Beckett. It’s real, Vladimir and Estragon, the obsession with the boots in the beginning. And when he and Suzanne were, had escaped from Paris and the Gestapo, so they walked all the way to the south of France and this little village, they hid in abandoned prisons, in ditches at night, they walked at night and hid during the day to avoid the Germans. And of course, they were walking, and boots and walking, they felt like tramps, they felt like these wandering exiles, wandering Jews maybe.

But anyway, wandering exiles, wandering humans, part of a multitude of people fleeing to get to the south, which was still unoccupied, but sleeping in the ditches and the eating and the food and trying to get a potato here, a turnip there, a carrot, because they had nothing. They had left in such a hurry, they had nothing. And it’s so close to the characters of Godot, and he’s honest about it later in life, Beckett. And so much of the interaction between Vladimir and Estragon is the bickering between husband and wife who have known each other for many, many years. The bickering, the arguments, the can’t stand this, irritate, it bugs me, and so on.

And underneath it is the love of friendship and humanity. And that, for me, is part of the irony, the pleasure, the wit with Beckett. Underneath is a friendship and a profound meaning of that word, whether it’s through a relationship, a marriage, or people who just love each other, being together for so many years, all that stuff, we’ll never separate, but we’ll always stay together, the compassion that emerges for humanity, a compassion for each other, even if we bicker and argue and disagree and shout and so on, as we always do with the people we love and been with for many, many years, friends or partners. And he writes that of course so much was taken from he and Suzanne talking like that on their way walking to the south of France and with boots and feet and what happened to their feet and they’re sore and itching and not being able to bath or clean, and it’s all in the play.

And that’s the kind of relationship between Vladimir and Estragon. How to survive in spite of despair. One imagines 1940, escaping 1941, we’re having worked for the resistance, his whole history, and rushing there, one can imagine, one must imagine this world for a moment, how to survive the despair, the fear of being caught, murdered. And the world must have been so terrifying, obviously, and so seemingly absurd and crazy, this mad world. How to survive, how to hold on to a purpose. It’s, for me, so reflected in Godot. He also wrote some political work, “Catastrophe”, which some friends of mine, William Kentridge, and some very close friends of mine in Johannesburg did many years ago, Beckett gave us the rights in 1982, which he dedicated to Václav Havel, who I was fortunate enough to work with in Prague, and directing it in Havel’s theatre.

Then, Billie Whitelaw, a fantastic British actress who worked on his plays, said that working with him, and Beckett directed her, was like being in an Edward Munch painting, you now the classic, “The Scream.” She said, “with all his work, the scream was inside "and my job as the actor was to try and get it out "with subtlety and humour.” He influences Pinter, Stoppard, Albee, just so many of the writers all over the world. And finally, there’s a ship in the Irish Navy and was recently made and it was called The Samuel Beckett. Can you imagine a country naming a war ship after a playwright? I want to just mention a little bit about Beckett and the Jews. There was a court case in 1937. Actually, let me first show you this.

This is a cartoon, and I’ve intentionally chosen it to show the wit the people who knew him saw his humour, his wit, his irony. This is a very good friend of his who drew cartoons of him. This is a Euro coin minted by the Irish government, 20 euros. And this is the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin, the new one on the right. Fascinating to me that this is like pop culture playing. Lovely. That in 1937 there was a trial and there was an Irish writer, quite a well-known one at the time, who’d written some piece which was very anti-Semitic, and he was an anti-Semitic writer. And Beckett consciously chose to give evidence that this was an anti-Semitic piece. He didn’t have to. And he gave evidence on behalf of two Jewish brothers.

Given the antisemitism of the times, not only amongst intellectuals and artists, but the zeitgeist, the cultures of not only Ireland, but Europe elsewhere. And the judge was scathing. He said, “I would not place much reliance "on Mr. Beckett and his evidence. "I would put it to the side.” I can’t imagine a judge saying this. I mean, it’s voluntary he’s giving the evidence. The trip I told you about, the Nazis, World War II, that whole story I told you about. What’s interesting, that part of, when he’s in Paris, while he is still working for the resistance before escaping, he meets a very good friend of his, Paul Léon, who’s Jewish. And Léon was Joyce’s secretary.

And Léon was freaked, terrified, looking for places to hide, and eventually, he survived by hiding, nevermind, in Paris and elsewhere outside of it in France. And he was very close friends. And Beckett kept giving him his own rations, his daily rations, he would come and give him every few days, every week, two, whenever he could. He tried to help other Jews who were in similar situations. And he said, look, and he wrote this. He said, “you couldn’t simply stand by "with your arms folded, "regardless of what my passport said.” I’ve mentioned all the other, the brush with death and everything that he had. He wrote afterwards-

• [Woman] I’m so sorry though, I’m not helping you, Greg.

• Hello? Oh okay, hi. He wrote, he kept giving money to people who were persecuted and Jews in particular. He said, “humanity is on its knees.” I’ve never forgotten that phrase since reading it early. He gave money. After his Nobel Prize, he gave money to aspiring writers, money to the Havel Foundation, money to so many causes and people all over the world. He was very friendly with a Jewish, a French Jewish Holocaust survivor, Avigdor Arikha, And in fact, Arikha’s daughter fairly recently gave a lovely talk at Tel Aviv University.

And they were very close friends for nearly 40 years 'cause Arikha had survived the death camps. And Arkiha had fought in the first Israeli War of Independence, and was seriously injured. And then Beckett and he were very good friends for many years. Basically, they both had escaped what Joyce called the nightmare of history. “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” Joyce’s phrase. The first version of “Waiting for Godot”, one of the main characters was called Lévy, and later changed to Estragon with about six or seven weeks before the production opened. Talking about carrots and turnips, this is from the wall, rationing.

One can imagine walking to the small town in the south of France. A phrase in the play, Estragon says, “we’ll go to the Pyrenees.” Well, that was the place in the Alps to aspire to try and escape, Jews and many others fleeing the Nazi persecution, to try and escape. A phrase in the play, “the skeletons”, and from the original translation, in the English translation, is a channel house, but the French word, the word means more mass grave of heap of bones. Now why would that be in Godot? He writes it, and he starts writing it really seriously from 1947.

There are, maybe, this is stretching a point, but a lot of recent scholars have found connections, 'cause if one looks at the historical context, not only the existential, as I mentioned earlier, there’s two approaches to Beckett. There’s an abstract philosophical and there’s a historical one. And I think both have a foot in the right journey of Beckett. And I don’t think one can ever, with any writer, ignore the context. Arthur Miller, many, many others. Joyce’s main character in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish man in Dublin. Why does he choose the Jew? Not that many Jews living in Ireland. And Joyce and he would’ve talked about all of these things 'cause they were so close.

The idea of exile, Beckett and Joyce Irish exile with their neutral passports in Paris escaping Ireland, 'cause I couldn’t stand it for many reasons. Okay, I merely plant as ideas for imaginative possible interpretations. There are so many ways to interpret his plays, and I want to try and give something fresh and different. And I hope it’s not a ridiculous sort of leap to Mars kind of imaginative interpretation, but one that emerges from the work in his life. He’s got existential, is it historical, is it both?

Ultimately, it’s metaphor, a metaphor of the clothes of thought, and art is all about metaphors, it’s about fiction, obviously, it’s about creating an image, a metaphor, to crystallise in space and time, some vision of life, an idea, so it’s never literal. And this is what Beckett clones in on in such a minimalist way of writing and staging and revolutionises theatre and writing after the influence of Joyce. There’s the influence of Joyce, of Beckett, and Brecht, Brecht with the political aspect and the influence of cabaret and all the singing and dance in theatre with a political message, Beckett, minimalist, metaphors of images that burn into the imagination, two tramps around a tree, a mother and a wife and a husband in a garbage, big garbage bin on stage, a man and a woman up to their necks in sand on stage.

These are images that burn. And in our times of such proliferation of millions and thousands of images daily, internet and everything else, we’re bombarded, our sensors are bombarded and colonised by images, to have such minimalism is such a breath of fresh air, so freeing, as our imagination is re-mobilized and taken into the world of imagination through the stage. It’s not literal of naturalism, a poetic image, two tramps around a tree, an image of two, a couple, up to their neck in the sand. It burns. What is Godot?

Ian McKellen, who I’ll show in the production shortly, writes, “Godot is whatever you like, whatever is in life, whatever in life that we are waiting for.” Maybe I’m waiting for luck to win the lottery. Maybe I’m waiting to fall in love. Maybe I’m waiting for a better job. Maybe I’m waiting for an interview. Maybe I’m waiting for the birth of a child, the birth of a grandchild. Maybe I’m waiting for my child to visit. Maybe I’m waiting to… Any kind of waiting. And what is that? And it’s a profound idea. What is the condition of waiting and why is it so profound post-Second World War, post-Holocaust in our times, and the image he chooses, two tramps around a tree. And they’re to the extreme, they can’t escape waiting. Waiting for salvation.

Godot, obviously the connection with God, or could be many others. But I think the truest meaning was he was, in 1947, he was watching a bicycle race in Paris and he just joined a whole lot of other spectators and he said, what’s everybody doing? And one guy turned to him and said, we’re all waiting for Monsieur Godot. Monsieur Godot was a well-known cyclist, not famous, but a well-known cyclist, in Paris shortly after the war, Monsieur Godot. We are waiting for Monsieur Godot, the cyclist. It’s one of two or three possible interpretations of where he got the word from. It’s, we are waiting, so as we can imagine, in daily life, obviously through the pandemic recently, but in so many other ways, that condition and then push to an extreme, like any good writer or artist, take one idea and push it to the extreme.

Don’t try and push four or five ideas. It’s one idea. Antigone, Medea, all the great, Hamlet, all the great, one idea pushed. Waiting for the plague to finish, waiting for the pandemic, waiting for things to, whatever, all these different things in life. In a poll done by the Royal British National Theatre in London in 1999, “Waiting for Godot” was voted the most significant English-language play of the 20th century. Fascinating.

Theodor Adorno writes about Beckett versus Brecht, and Adorno was a Marxist philosopher, but he takes the side of Beckett because he says Beckett understands, in the terms of the dialectic, he understands the antithesis, he understands that show this and it’s more imaginative than Brecht, who’s more literal and pumping the message through and it will wane with time, whereas these images of Beckett will not. And he sees it as a critique of the Second World War, of the war and business and capitalism and all of it together.

But that’s Adorno. It’s also about triumph of hope over despair because they hope Godot will pitch up. Does he ever pitch? We don’t know. No, not in the play. But there’s the mere act of waiting implies hope. Otherwise, there’s no point in waiting. We’re waiting for a job interview, waiting to hear if I’m going to get the promotion, waiting to hear if my child will be okay, waiting to hear if my partner, my husband or wife, is okay, or waiting to get out of the hospital, whatever it is, it implies hope. And that’s often missed by people who watch the play. Time is the gold in life, and uncertainty with time is the gold in life. What is the role of the impotence in the moments of waiting?

And Beckett talks about, I wanted to write about impotence. And it’s a philosophical idea, not just sexually erotic, sexually impotent, it’s a profound internal condition. One could be impotent in waiting or one not. And that’s the dilemma, the questions set up in the play. Time is the gold. And that’s what dawns on us as we watch it when it’s well done. As one of, as Vladimir says in the play, “have you not done tormenting me with your curse of time? "It’s abominable. "Is one day not enough for you to live? "One day we were born, one day we shall die. Is that not enough for you? We give birth astride of the grave, the light gleans an instant, then it is night once more. The light gleans an instant, then it is night once more.”

We have a moment, a moment while we’re waiting, a moment in life, grab it, cease it. A curse of time. How do we deal when we look at it in this way? It’s not a polemic, which is what Adorno argued. Some of the productions, Britain, interestingly, censored the first production in the mid fifties, and only in 1964 did it allow an uncensored production. There was a production in Sarajevo in '93 by Susan Sontag, and it was the New York Times headline, “Waiting for Clinton to Help”, was the New York Times headline. So many people, because they were waiting for Clinton who finally helped, sent in some of the troops and the aeroplanes , to help in the Bosnian, in the war. “Waiting for Clinton,” headline in New York Times.

How it got out into the popular, wider culture. New Orleans, there was a wonderful production in 2007 after Hurricane Katrina. Many people watched waiting for help from FEMA, from the government. Many people came. And the phrase in the play that caused the stunned silence in the audience, “at this moment, at this place and time, or mankind is us, let us do something while we have the chance, Vladimir.” San Quentin Prison, 1962 and '63, fascinating productions, some of the first to do theatre in prison, in San Quentin, one of the harshest in America. And it influenced the inmates. And the inmates were stunned. They watched it in silence, in awe.

And Beckett later became friendly with one of the inmates who, when he got out, and the inmate went on to set up a theatre company in America and produced many of Beckett’s plays and he and Beckett became friends. And Beckett said, well, when we were fleeing these Gestapo, Suzanne and I slept in many abandoned prisons, in ditches, and it influenced my work in some way. Of course, this guy’s in prison, what could be a better image than waiting? Then there’s the character of Pazzo and Lucky. Pazzo is the master, Lucky is the slave. That one image of master slave coming after the war and the Holocaust is the essence of human relationships.

On the one hand, this friendship, which is bedraggled and complex and bewildering and funny and compassionate and bickering, as a couple who have been together for many, many years. And on the other hand, which has compassion in it though, on the other hand, Lucky and Pazzo, the slave and the master. Two images of human relationships. The one comes from Hegel, where the master needs a slave in order to be recognised that they’re a master. Otherwise, if you don’t have a slave, you’re not a master. In contemporary language, validation from the slave means you can be a master, and vice versa, ironically, you can only be a slave if a master gives recognition.

In this way, what’s fascinating is he saw, I think, the essence of two relationships, master, slave, this is after the war, the Aryan and the Nazi to the west, or compassion. Okay, then the last thing I want to mention here before I’m going to show you some of the clips is there were the influence of vaudeville and musical that Beckett wrote about and spoke about cannot be underestimated. And the comedy that musical and vaudeville relies on is central, and the physical comedy of vaudeville, it’s not just verbal, it’s physical and human in that way, and the huge influence on all his work. And lastly, when somebody said to him, when I listen to your plays, it sounds like your tramps might have had PhDs. And he said, how do you know they haven’t? Have you spoken to other tramps? He’s constantly opening it. Why did he call the character Lucky?

Well, I suppose he’s lucky because he has no more illusory expectations of life. It’s so interesting when one delves in to see this attitude. Okay, now, before I go on, I’m going to show just one or two clips here. This is the bottom left. This is from a production in India fairly recently. On the bottom left, the tramps around the tree, and the top right, a production in England. And then here, these are just productions from all over. Look at the faces on these tramps, look at the faces, the wit, the humour, of course the despair is underneath. When the productions are terrible is when the despair is pumped in our face. It’s not subtly hinted underneath. The irony, the wit, the paradox is on top.

Okay, then I want to show here, this is from the very first production done in America by Alan Schneider with Zero Mostel and Burgess Meredith playing Vladimir and Estragon. Very early Zero Mostel.

[Clip begins]

• Nothing to be done.

• I’m beginning to come around to the same opinion. All my life, I’ve tried to put it from me saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle. There you are at last!

• Am I?

• I thought you were gone forever!

• Me too.

• Together again at last! We must celebrate this, but how? Get up so I embrace you.

• Not now, not now!

• May one inquire where his highness spent the night?

• In a ditch.

• A ditch, where?

• Over there.

• And they didn’t beat you?

• Certainly they beat me.

• That’s the same lot as usual?

• The same, I don’t know.

• Oh when I think of it, but for me, all these years, what would you be? You’d be nothing more little heap of bones in present time, there’s no doubt about it.

• And what of it?!

• Oh, it’s too much for one man. On the other hand, what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the nineties.

• Oh, stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing!

• Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower amongst the first. See, we were respectable in those days. Now, it’s too late. They wouldn’t even let us out. What are you doing?

• Taking off my boots. Did that never happen to you?

• Boots must be taken off every day. I’m tired of telling you that.

• Help me.

• It hurts?

• Hurts, he wants to know if it hurts.

• Oh, nobody ever suffers but you, and I tell you what , you’d say if you had what I had.

• It hurts?

• It hurts. He wants to know if it hurts.

• You might button it all the same.

• Oh. Never neglect the little things of life.

• Well, what do you expect? You always wait till the last moment.

• The last moment.

• Why won’t you help me?

• Sometimes I feel it coming and then I, I go all peculiar.

[Clip ends]

• Okay, I’m going to hold this here because we can see here is that from the very beginning of the play, just one or two things, it’s the beginning of the physical comedy, especially through Zero Mostel, is brilliant, as we know, and how his career took off after, this is early days. But we, his character, Zero Mostel’s character, is more physical, more concerned with his ailments, his legs, his boots, his other things, more earthy, food, getting a turnip, getting a carrot to eat. And the Burgess Meredith character is more philosophical. Between the two, it’s set up, and the stage set is fairly obvious there.

Okay, then this is a clip, one line, the character’s name is Vladimir, and it’s quite a bit of speculation if it wasn’t based on just the idea of Vladimir Lennon, and as Trudy has mentioned, Lennon escaping from Switzerland and so on. And there’s a phrase from Lennon at the beginning, “I resume the struggle,” which is what the Burgess Meredith character says early on. Okay, this is from a production, a recent one, 2013, by Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart. A fantastic, brilliant, witty production. Must be a minute yet. Okay, it should come up.

[Clip begins]

• Say, I am happy!

• I am happy.

• So am I.

• So am I.

• We are happy!

• We are happy. What do we do now, now that we’re happy?

• You should have been a poet.

• Oh dear. Oh, I was, until this.

• Ah, . Exactly. How does it fit me?

• How would I know?

• Well that passed the time.

• It would’ve passed in any case.

[Clip ends]

• And there’s the compassionate friendship at the end between the two as actors and in the performance. I just wanted to show this last one, a very recent one, and I don’t think it’s just done for gimmicks and tricks, it’s to show the influence of vaudeville and musical reviews and so on, but I think beautiful production, and every generation must find its own contemporary way into these great, brilliant masterpieces of theatre.

And I think, to laugh, one always knows the phrase, humour over despair. The first joke in Freud’s jokes in the unconscious. Okay, let me not go into it. A couple of other ideas. What about this idea of God and religion? In the play, there’s a lot of references to the scriptures. Vladimir says, “do you remember the gospels?” And they talk about the coloured maps, the holy land. And he says, “yes, I remember learning about the Dead Sea at school and the pale blue of the sea.”

The story of the two thieves who, according to the gospel of Luke, where the two thieves were crucified next to Christ, and as I’m sure everyone knows, where the one was saved, and they talk about it, one was saved, it’s a reasonable percentage, 50/50. It’s always playing with a paradox, set up the one, set up the other, set up the hope, the despair. But it’s driven by a search for purpose, which is action, which means action. And the tree of life, obviously, the Garden of Eden, having this empty tree on stage. All these are imaginative echoes in resonance.

When Estragon asked Vladimir what he’s asked what he wants Godot to do. And Vladimir says, “oh, nothing very definite.” Estragon, “a kind of prayer?” “Precisely.” “A vague supplication?” “Exactly.” They’re being creative with ideas, with language, with bits of Western civilization, the Enlightenment, the history of centuries. Fantastic speech by Lucky, which is the only speech in the play by the slave, Lucky, who’s deaf and mute, later in the second act, where it’s like the ruins of Western thought, the ruins of thought and philosophy and location and Europe and other things.

He’s writing in '47, staged for it in '53, Holocaust, the war, and it’s just bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle that its got pieces that don’t mix or match. They’re just scraps taken from the ruins of Europe after the war and put together in a seemingly nonsensical speech trying to make sense. How do you make sense of the Holocaust and the war after that? Can we imagine it in that time, Beckett and the character, Lucky? What does the philosophy mean? What does this mean? So many things after what’s happened, speech of Lucky. Biblical references, but they’re always ironic or sarcastic. God is cursed for both his absence and for a kind of presence with an eye of surveillance in the play.

And for me, there’s a, and that’s the dichotomy that the two characters play with. Completely absent, but a kind of shadowy surveillance presence. The friends that I mentioned, the compassion, as Stewart and McKellan walk off with there at the end. Then, shortly after Apartheid ended, Lara Foot, who was one of my brilliant students at Wits, one of my post-grads, brilliant, fantastic student, who went on, and I’m sure many people know, she runs the Baxter Theatre now in Cape Town. Lara, fantastic. And she staged Godot. And so many people at the time, and this is in the late nineties, said to her, sorry, earlier, said to her, how can you stage Godot, the play by Beckett, this play about meaninglessness and purposelessness of life, absurdity, in these tumultuous times in South Africa? You’re mad, you’re crazy, nobody’s ever going to come, it’s mad.

Well, it turned about to be the hit of the year. She did it at the Wits Theatre and people flocked. It was full for every performance. Black people who’d never been to theatre or hardly just emerging out of the horror Apartheid, and whites, it was the hit. Why? At that moment in history in South Africa? Why? Godot? I’ll leave it to your imagination. Then in the 1950s, I said, Beckett was amazed because the Lord Chamberlain had, was seriously censoring this play. He wanted words like erection taken out. He wanted words like warts to replace clap. He wanted to ban the play completely.

And a certain lady, Dorothy Howard, wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, “well, running through the play "is the desire of two old tramps continually to relieve themselves. Such a dramatisation of lottery that lavatory necessities is offensive to me and almost all sense of British decency. It should not be performed.” Lady Dorothy Howard writing to the Lord Chamberlain to ban it. And to censor it. It’s extraordinary, and Beckett was stunned. The bastion of free speech and after the war, again, to be thinking like that.

Wins the Evening Standard Awards against huge opposition in London led by Sir Malcolm Sergeant who threatened to resign on the board, et cetera, if Godot won. And they worked out a good old compromise and it became Award for the Most Controversial Play of the Year. That award was never given again. Broadway was a huge, it was a big hit in 1956, and then the 2013 and the others, et cetera, and many others all over the world.

Okay, if I may, I’d just like to show this here… some phrases from the play. “People are bloody ignorant apes.” This is not a timid little terrified, anxious, anxiety-riddled writer. And the phrase I love from the play, “ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.” It’s almost Churchill. The thing about succeeding is about pulling yourself up every time you fail. Similar to what Mandela once said, the courage, and Churchill said that, and Mandela, the courage is what you do when you are on the ground.

“They give birth astride.” “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for it.” There’s wit, there’s humour, and there’s despair. “There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” One can resonate so many philosophical and psychological meanings, but it’s concrete of two characters on a stage. And lastly, “I can’t go on like this.” “That’s what you think.” No matter how bad it gets in life, when we’re waiting or whatever condition, I just, I can’t bear it, I can’t go on anymore, whatever it is may be happening, well, that’s what you think. How are we going to go on in life?

Find the purpose, which is what they’re looking for in the image, metaphor of Godot, who never arrives, who never comes, who never pictures in the play. Just the two tramps around the tree the whole time. It’s however bad it gets, we can endure, and endure not only with despair, but possibly a glimpse of hope because the light does gleam an instant. And of course, it’s night forever, before and after.

Okay, there’s one or two other clips, but I’m going to hold it from some Irish productions, which are very interesting and very different. And I wanted to try and show it, not only the existential and the philosophical approaches, but something that emerges from the life of the man and his times. As for me, a remarkable writer.

Okay, thanks very much everybody, and hope you are well everywhere you may be on this afternoon. And Lauren, happy to do questions.

Q&A and Comments

Okay, thank you. Judith, Mavis. Yep. Oh, that’s great. Yep, absolutely, Richard, Doris. The Masque Theatre is run by two very good friends of mine in Cape Town.

Thanks, about the banter. Yeah, it’s Barry Ronge, of course, lectured it well. Yep. GBS, of course, sure, thank you. , please discuss Happy Days, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape. That’d be wonderful. Perhaps in a second session next week, as Wendy suggested. That’d be great.

David, you’re right, diet only started affecting heart disease in the sixties, in the fifties. Maybe Beckett had heard about it 'cause there was heart disease history and heart attacks in the family. But he ate fish. That was one of the things that actually started me on fish many, many years ago.

You saw Godot in Paris, '69. Brilliant. Brilliant, Beckett was psychoanalysed. Yeah, Romaine.

Q: Do you see Godot, a great play, reflecting comic tragic? A: Yep. Exactly, Romaine. As Beckett says at the beginning of the play, it’s a comic, a comic, it’s a comic tragedy. Okay, it’s both. And I think the tragedy in the comedy.

Theodor Adorno, it’s A-D-O-N-R. A-D-O-N, oh sorry, A-D-O-R-N-O.

Q: Colleen, could we have a lecture on Peggy Guggenheim? A: That’d be fascinating. That’d be a really interesting lady. Perhaps a lecture joint with some of my other wonderful colleagues on Lockdown.

Q: Cheryl, a key aspect to Beckett being stabbed was when he asked the perpetrator, why’d you do that? A: That’s right, Cheryl. He said it at the trial afterwards because the guy was caught and there was a trial, and at the first hearing, Beckett asked him, why did you do that? And the guy replied, I don’t know, sir, which is part of the theme of “Waiting for Godot.” Absolutely. Yeah, Cheryl, you’re right, that’s spot on. And actually, Beckett dropped charges.

Then Romaine, beyond theories, focus on the capacity for knowing and not knowing. Great, thank you. That’s great.

Q: Was Beckett’s post-absurdism? A: Yeah, I think it was all part of the Camus, Sartre world in the thirties, in particular, the influence of Camus and later.

Betty, Beckett was a great friend and supporter, emotional and financial, of Sorel Etrog, a young Jewish man. When they first met, became world-renowned sculptor who lived in Toronto. Great. History remark? Yes, that is the remark from, it’s at the beginning of Joyce’s Ulysses, John, yep. “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”

Denise, Samuel, David, what is the silicone bracelet? Oh, this one here? I’ve had this bracelet, well, to be honest, I mean, I’ve had multiple sclerosis for 38 and a half years, and this bracelet says, “never stop fighting” for MS, and I give some money every month towards MS charities and other things just to help the research, et cetera.

The other thing, interestingly, Denise, is that because his name was Samuel Beckett, the Germans had a particular interest, and when they were interview, when they were, I suppose, questioning and various times, because his first name was Samuel, they, of course, assumed he was Jewish, but he was working for the resistance, so can you imagine the tricky thing he was playing with with an Irish passport?

Q: Monique, if I were to say that Beckett was a nihilist, how would you defend him? A: Monique, that would take at least another lecture, but I would defend him. I don’t think he was a nihilist. If he was a nihilist, I don’t think the comedy that we can find shown in the McKellen, and the Zero Mostel and the Stewart production, and many others, Lara’s production that I mentioned in Joburg, many, many others, the productions that are superb, they have the comedy, as I said, which is on the stage, and the subtle nihilism or despair or fear, worry is subtly inside, the tragedy is subtly inside the farce, the comedy.

Q: Did he write Godot in French? A: Yes. After the war, he started writing in French everything and then he would translate it all back into English, because he said French, writing in French helped him be absolutely minimalist with the number of words. Totally opposite again to Joyce, which was the last explosion of, from the 19th century influence of the English novel, huge numbers of words.

Marian, nihilistic quality in Godot. Yep. Maybe some kind of hope, but it does seem to have no ending, no real point. Hope is futile. Well, I would suggest no, because I think that hope is not. I think he’s saying the condition of waiting, inside it, Marian, I would personally suggest that, my personal opinion, of course, that inside waiting implies a hope that something will happen. If it does or doesn’t is a separate story. But we wouldn’t wait, we’d, as they talk in the play, we’d go off and commit suicide, or I don’t know, go and do something else. Why wait if we don’t imply that something will happen?

Okay, Vivian, thank you.

Q: Ever seen the part of the documentary? A: Yep, I’ve seen that with his collaboration with Buster Keaton. It’s fantastic, in film, which Beckett wrote.

Denise, John Brickell, Burke, yep. Contemplating Godot after Russian , which you did. Wonderful. Godot didn’t do it. Yep. It’s extraordinary really, this production has been done from prisons to just at the time of Apartheid finishing to Sarajevo in the middle of the war. Susan Sontag does “Waiting for Godot.” I mean, extraordinary, and the audiences flock. They get it, they get the metaphor, it doesn’t need to be naturalistic and literal.

Thanks, Bobby. It’s HH, great. Denise. Tar.

Carol, Estragon introduced himself as Adam. I think it’s, again, a play on religious and scriptural sources and the literature, 'cause there are so many, as you would know in the play. There’s Adam, and there’s Christ, and all the references, Luke, the story of the thieves crucified, and so on.

Action production in Stratford, Ontario. Great. Shatan, if anyone wishes to learn more about Beckett’s life, especially during the war, Joe Baker’s book. Yep. And another one by, a recent one, by Joseph Knowlson, is a fantastic one about his period in the war and the influence of that on his life and work.

Okay, thank you, Denise. Mavis. Jackie. Thank you so much, Sharon. Judith. Thank you, Denise. Josie, Ruth, thank you. Barry.

Q: Was Beckett connected to DH Lawrence? A: Very interesting, I don’t know. I’ll find out. Really interesting. Rhonda. I know he was very connected to the remarkable artistic and intellectual period in Paris between the walls. I don’t know, which included, of course, the American writers and even Gerard Sekoto, the Black South African artist, was there, and others.

Q; Rhonda, who was the doctor who made reference at the very beginning? A: Bion, B-I-O-N, the fascinating psych analyst that Beckett went to for two years.

Q: Are we all waiting for Godot all our life? A: Well, possible.

JH, thank you, okay. Aye, did English together at Wits. Marcia. Hi, Marcia, hope you’re well. Production, great. Lorna, appreciate. Production of Pinter’s Caretaker, yep. Going to Sitka, exactly. Pinter actually influenced, Pinter, the only person Pinter, once he started to make a name of it, the only person Pinter ever sent his last draught to was Beckett for his criticism, critique, and to fix up. And after that, subsequently, quite a lot did. The number of emerging young writers that he helped, not only from England, from all over the world, Ireland, writers we’ve never heard of, is extraordinary.

• [Woman] Just finishing up.

• And then Donnie. Saw Godot, okay. Okay, the style, French title gives slightly different tone. Yep. It’s interesting, I don’t, my French is terrible, but I’ve read scholars who write about the translation in the different versions, more references to that period of the forties in the original French. There’s Franks and the Eiffel Tower.

Q: Lawrence, is it true that Beckett was totally controlling? A: Yes, he didn’t allow, he wouldn’t allow that Godot specifically to be made into a film. And he wanted it to be kept metaphor and image, so never, the set could not be naturalistic and set in an obvious rubbish dump somewhere in a very poverty stricken area of whatever country. He never wanted to be literal or naturalistic. Keep the idea of metaphor on stage, so we even see in the very original production with Zero Mostel, it’s metaphorical. With McKellan, it’s all metaphor.

Okay, Corey and Tar. Gloria. Thank you so much, everybody. Humanity. I think it stemmed from his family upbringing and also what he saw during the war. Remember again, he was Irish with a neutral passport, chose to fight for the resistance, and seriously fight, not very peripheral. Sartre and the others were very peripheral. And only, by the way, by the end, by 1944, by the time the allies reached Paris, only 2% of French people, it was reckoned, maximum 2% were part of the resistance, so can we imagine in 1940, '41 when Beckett joins how very few French people, let alone Irish, are joining the resistance?

Thanks, Sue. Jasper Johns, yep. Helen, I think, great, and then Denise again. Okay, great. Okay, thank you, everybody.

Thank you, Lauren, so much for your help during the week, and to Judy as always, and Wendy.

Take care, stay safe.