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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
At the time when Godot was first done, it liberated something for anybody writing plays. It redefined the minima of theatrical validity. It was as simple as that. He got away. He won by twenty-eight lengths, and he'd done it with so little – and I mean that as an enormous compliment. There we all were, busting a gut with great monologues and pyrotechnics, and this extraordinary genius just put this play together with enormous refinement, and then with two completely unprecedented and uncategorisable bursts of architecture in the middle – terrible metaphor – and there it was, theatre.
(The New Review, Vol. 1, no. 9, December 1974, pp. 18–19)The growing myth of Godot
The enthusiasm that Tom Stoppard expresses here in a 1974 talk with Ronald Hayman is symptomatic of the way people have always responded to Waiting for Godot. From the time Beckett's play thrilled and confounded its first audiences, it has invariably provoked passionate responses inside and out of the theatre, both from those who admired it and those who found it tedious or objectionable. When Bertolt Brecht came across a copy of Warten auf Godot in 1953, he was so challenged by Beckett's enigmatic stance that he began to sketch what he called a Gegenentwurf, a counterdraft or adversarial design, which he hoped would result in a new version of the play. In his notes for a Marxist answer to Beckett, Brecht conceives of Estragon as the proletarian, Vladimir the intellectual, Von Pozzo a landed aristocrat, and poor Lucky a policeman or a fool.
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