Word: beckett
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Waiting for Godot, by 50-year-old Irish-born Samuel Beckett, who was once a sort of secretary to James Joyce, is one more of those writings that pose philosophic question marks with the emphasis of exclamation points. Like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Kafka's The Castle and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Waiting for Godot makes who's who-and sometimes what's what-a kind of guessing game...
...simple as to be almost nonexistent is Beckett's tale of two penniless, hapless, smelly tramps waiting, in a barren countryside, for a neighborhood personage named Godot. They chatter, gnaw carrots, tug at a tight shoe, talk of going separate ways and of hanging themselves, encounter a rich, unhappy magnate driving his servant before him as with whips. At the end of Act 1, a boy arrives to say that Godot cannot come that night but will the next. The next night, after further waiting and talking, a boy arrives to say that again Godot cannot come. As before...
...Beckett's firm control over his material is a possible key to appraising his achievement, and to rescuing his play from both philistine splutters and arty rhapsodizing. For what Beckett brings to his posing of generally impalpable and major truths is a genuine but essentially minor talent. He has a gift for the theatricality of nothing happening, for small sudden changes of key, for the humor of despair. For all its vernacular and even outhouse touches, his is an artificial and sophisticated style, a succinct loquacity. At bottom, Godot is both a neatly fingered exercise...
...daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. ** She is now married to John de Lazlo, the co-respondent in the suit. Her two sons, though awarded to Peter by the court, live with her. The elder boy is at Eton. ***Anthony Eden divorced his first wife, Beatrice Beckett, in June 1950, was married to Winston Churchill's niece Clarissa in a London registry office in August...
...Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, another philosophic piece, was touched only by tedium. The setting is a desolate swamp where for eternity two hoboes talk about how bored they are. They are waiting, as you might suspect, for Godot, a nobleman who will bring salvation from their misery. During the evening, three symbols of humanity stroll past, Godot never appears and the dialogues about boredom become more persuasive by the minute. Even allowing for the innovations in technique, I found Godot on evening of baggy-pants comedy and penny-dreadful philosophy with little power, wit, or charm...