Word: beckett
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When the curtain rises on Samuel Beckett's play it reveals a stage bare of everything but a few shapes vaguely suggestive of rocks and something that resembles a tree. Soon two hobos named Estragon and Vladimir come onstage, and the audience learns that they are waiting for someone called Godot to meet them there. The pair talk for a while, and than they are joined by two other characters, a cruel slave-driver and the slave whom he leads around on the end of a rope. After some more conversation, Pozzo, the master, and Lucky, the slave leave...
Such are the facts of Waiting for Godot, and every-one in the audience would probably agree that they saw this much. But when it comes to deciding what it means, or even what, precisely, was said, all agreement ends. And that, Beckett has declared, is just as it should be, since the play is calculated to mean exactly what each member of the audience wants it to mean. At the risk of contradicting the author, I suggest that his statement is not quite accurate, because if the play makes no definite point, it at least embodies a point...
...proper lable for the work may be, it is often splendidly theatrical. With a surface reminiscent of a Charlie Chaplin film, it offers long stretches which are at once amusing and profound. But there are other stretches which are quite dull. The trouble here seems to be that Beckett ventured on dangerous ground when he did away with a plot and made his characters into symbols rather than people. The mainspring of drama is conflict between very much living and three-dimensional people, even if they are confined to a stage. Beckett, however, expected to let his ideas carry most...
...Lucky, the part demands a pantomimist, and in Geoffrey Holder it has found a master of this form. Herbert Berghof, who also directed the original production, molded the four performances into a superbly balanced whole, and accomplished his job with imagination and no little daring. The merits of Samuel Beckett's contribution to the evening may be debated, but the work of these five men stands far above the possibility of reproach...
Waiting for Godot, the event the expectation of which has enabled more than a few of us to take that next step through this winter's slush. Pozzo and the rest of Beckett's boys played by an all-Negro cast. Tonight is the second of ten, at the Shubert. (Mat. on Sattidy...