Waiting for Godot

Even just waiting can sometimes pay!

Vladimir and Estragon are tramps and clowns who sit under a tree, awaiting the arrival of someone called Godot. Though the only thing they are certain about is the person’s name. They are not even sure to be waiting on the right place, on the right day and at the right hour. Their dialogues, based on seemingly nonsensical sentences and hollow clichés, are gradually transforming themselves into a testimony of the absudrity of human existence. Their waiting thus become a metaphor of a quest for any kind of prospects, revealing the impossibility of breaking free from the spinning top of one’s meaninglessness. By their names already – Vladimir alias the Ruler of the Universe, and Estragon alias Wormwood – the two characters prefigure the style of the drama in which subtle irony intermingles with cruelty, child playfulness with the most deplorable instincts. It was Waiting for Godot (1949) that made Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Irish novelist and playwright awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, the leading representative of absurd drama. His play reveals the bareness of the post-war word in which language becomes a witness of acts for which words are hard to find. In spite of its intellectual concept full of paradoxes, Waiting for Godot abounds with situational comicalness and peculiar humour, creating a new absurd world that remains credible and very human. The world’s most famed absurd tragicomedy, in which ‘nothing’ turns into ‘infinity’, sharp humour into poetry and waiting into a journey over the less visible landscapes of the human soul, will be staged by Michal Vajdička.