Word: godot
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...spirit of the book are unwaveringly African. His play, The Road, which won first prize in the first and only Dakar Festival of Negro Arts, is infused with patterns and dialogue reminiscent of Beckett and Pinter, but the message is uniquely African. A kind of African Waiting for Godot, it concerns a group of drivers, thugs, passengers and autoparts scavengers in a broken-down truck who are dominated by an ex-minister awaiting a revelation. The revelation is that the road itself is a god: "The great dusty snake in whose life all their lives are contained, in whose coils...
They kill the time with intellectual vaudeville-puns, word games, syllogistic oneupmanship. As they do so, it becomes apparent that Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett's dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.'s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate...
...life but not quite into death, "without the courage to end or the strength to go on." Nothing happens; nobody comes, nobody goes. Yet his plays (Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape) and novels (Malloy, Murphy) are metaphors of modern man's spiritual bafflement. "Waiting for Godot" has become a tagline for frustration...
Eleven years ago, the play which struck New York as daring and venturesome was the ill-fated Broadway production of Waiting for Godot. Today, the same nerves have apparently been hit by the highly profitable Off-Broadway prank, MacBird. Obviously, these works have little in common aside from their relative popular momentum and their respective pans from Walter Kerr. Beckett's sad farce, already found on at least three Harvard reading lists, seems firmly included in the century's catalogue of major literature. Barbara Garson, on the other hand, has chosen quite deliberately to write on water in order...
...what if Godot had arrived? And what if he were even more absurd than the Beckett boys who awaited him? He probably would have come as Valentine Brose, the nonsenstential anti-hero of Henry Livings' balmy farce...