It is in this area, a landscape reminiscent of a leftover combat zone, that the hat swapping scene takes place. Somehow a thin, black tree rises from this wasteland, behind Vladimir and Estragon. Vladimir and Estragon roam the bleak dirt road, surrounded by mountains of gray, colorless debris that resemble mounds and mounds of ruins. In the film adaptation, the setting remains minimalist but amplifies the theme with an almost post-apocalyptic scenario. For example, the description of the setting in Beckett’s script consists of “a country road. The filmed performance of “Waiting for Godot”, released in 2001 as part of a Beckett on Film project and screened at the Barbican Centre in London, illustrates the postwar theme most blatantly. Godot, symbolic of the government, consistently fails Vladimir and Estragon despite their compliance, but they are unable to see that he will never come to save them, and so the cycle continues. Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo’s lower class foils, embody the desperation of a population deeply affected by a broken system, and attempt to seek help from an authority they believe has all the answers: Godot. Pozzo, a central purveyor of the play’s comedy, represents a ruling elite that has taken advantage of the chaos so much that it has made slaves out of educated, presumably middle class human beings like Lucky.
The cyclic nature of the plot penetrates the dialogue so much that ideas of hopelessness and suicide become routine, colliding with lighter moments of ridiculous conversation held by the characters. The protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, though airheaded and sometimes even nonsensical, convey more dark, morbid subjects than they do funny ones. Thus, the alienation in “Waiting for Godot” actually becomes a familiar phenomenon in front of this audience, and communicates the sentiment of the time period-a crumbled infrastructure, a collapsed government, lingering chaos and poverty.įor these viewers, the absurdism in the play reflects the sociopolitical environment of the postwar era, or their reality. At the time of its first premiere in Paris in 1953, France, like much of the continent, was struggling to regain its strength and prestige in the aftermath of war. The word “parody” insinuates a satiric or ironic imitation of reality, and contrary to that definition, the play’s foundation rests on a climate easily recognized by an audience living in post-World War II Europe. The universe that Beckett creates in “Waiting for Godot” is a bizarre, incomprehensible landscape that almost seems to be a parody of our own. Set in some kind of strange post-apocalyptic world, the piece employs two elderly homeless men as its protagonists who further propel the theme of isolation they stay stuck in a cycle of stagnation, waiting for a presumably authoritative figure called Godot whom they’ve been expecting for what seems like forever. Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is a play that seems to alienate its audience.
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