The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Samuel Beckett · a tragicomedy in two acts · five speaking parts · written in French as En attendant Godot (1952) and made into English by Beckett himself (1954) · scored on the play in both its author’s languages, read from knowledge, the English the text of record; no text in hand
Mode
Tragicomedy; music-hall cross-talk and metaphysical drama in one action
Mythos
The advent that does not arrive; the messenger who comes twice; the two thieves, the sheep and the goats; master and servant on one rope
Phase
Two evenings, the second the day after the first, each ending in nightfall and a resolution to go that is not kept
Presentation
Drama; two acts without scenes, five speaking parts, one setting, written in French and made into English by its author
Register
From the double act’s stichomythia and Pozzo’s rhetoric to Lucky’s unpunctuated torrent, the Boy’s “Yes Sir” and the lyric duets
Scale
One road, one tree, five men, two evenings
Governing Proposition
Two men wait by a tree on a country road for someone called Godot, who sends word at nightfall that he will not come this evening but surely tomorrow; a master and his servant pass, and pass again, ruined overnight. The wager of the play is that a life organised around a promised arrival becomes the practice of waiting itself, that habit and friendship are what make it bearable, and that only a stage, where the audience waits in the same time as the waiters, can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Route à la campagne, avec arbre. Soir.”
“A country road. A tree. Evening.” The first direction gives the whole set, and the first line gives the whole action: “Rien à faire.”
“Nothing to be done.” Estragon says it, and Vladimir takes it up as an opinion: “I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.” The play opens on a sentence about action that denies it, and the joke and the denial arrive together. Beckett wrote it in French, as En attendant Godot, “pièce en deux actes”, and after the Paris run made the English himself, “a tragicomedy in two acts”. No other hand stands between him and either text. The English subtitle names the double register in which every line of both is played.
The shape can be told in a sentence, because the play tells it twice. Two men wait by a tree and fill the time with routines; a master and his servant arrive and leave; a boy brings word that Godot will not come this evening; night falls; the two agree to go, and do not move. Then: “Le lendemain. Même heure. Même endroit.”
“Next day. Same time. Same place.” The second act changes almost nothing, and what it changes is terrible. The tree has four or five leaves. The master is blind and the servant dumb. The closing lines are exchanged between the two friends. There are five speaking parts, no woman on the stage, and no scenes; the title character never appears.
One fact holds the two men to the road, and they keep forgetting it. “Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Godot.” “Ah!” In the French the answer is three words, “On attend Godot.” The exchange comes round again and again through both acts, and each time it closes the question it opened. Meanwhile the stage keeps admitting it is a stage. Estragon looks out at the house and says “Inspiring prospects.” Vladimir runs off to relieve himself with “Keep my seat.”, and Estragon calls after him, “End of the corridor, on the left.” When Estragon complains, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”, he is describing the evening the audience is spending, in the same minutes as his own.
Movement II
The sacred reaches the two men as scraps of a schoolroom. Estragon remembers the maps of the Holy Land: “The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty.” Vladimir worries at the two thieves crucified with Christ, and works out the odds: “One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable percentage.” Two thieves, one saved; two tramps on a road, and no word on which. The figures are quoted and dropped, as a man might quote something half remembered, but the pair of thieves stands behind the pair of friends for the rest of the play.
The frame they stand in is older than any of its fragments. Someone has promised to come. A messenger arrives at nightfall: “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.” Questioned, the Boy says that he minds the goats and Mr. Godot does not beat him; his brother minds the sheep, and is beaten. The sheep and the goats of the Last Judgement are there, and the judgement is turned over. The author declined to say who Godot is, and that refuses a key; it does not remove the structure, which is on the stage in plain sight: a promised one, a messenger, a judgement put off until tomorrow.
The second evening fills the frame in. Estragon tries names on the fallen, blind Pozzo: “Abel! Abel!” Pozzo cries out. “Cain! Cain!” He cries out again. “He’s all humanity.” The second Boy, asked about Mr. Godot’s beard, says “I think it’s white, Sir.” Vladimir’s answer is “Christ have mercy on us!” The tree is the only thing on the road that could serve as a cross or a gallows, and the two men consider hanging themselves from it. Everything archetypal stays particular: boots, a bladder, a carrot. The phrase in the title has passed into many languages as the name of a wait for what will not come.
Movement III
Pozzo enters at the end of a rope, and Lucky is at the other end of it, carrying a bag of sand. “Up pig!” Pozzo has a destination: “I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him.” His rhetoric fills the road, and the two friends, who have nothing, find themselves an audience for a man who owns another man. The rope binds both ends. In the second act the same two cross the stage still tied together, and the master who drove the servant can no longer see where the servant is taking him.
As the light goes Pozzo gives his visitors a speech about the twilight, in the high manner, and lets it fall at the end: “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.” Then, to entertain them, he gives the order “Think, pig!”, and Lucky thinks aloud, almost without punctuation, in one breath of learning: “a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown”. It is the only thinking the play allows, and it is terror played as comedy. The theological sentence breaks down into its own repetitions, until “the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara”.
When master and servant have gone, the Boy comes with his message, and night falls at once. The moon rises, and Estragon gives it a line of Shelley’s, “Pale for weariness.”, and goes on: “Of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us.” The first evening ends on a resolution. “Alors, on y va ?” “Allons-y.” “Ils ne bougent pas.”
“Well, shall we go?” “Yes, let’s go.” They do not move. Estragon asks and Vladimir answers. The curtain comes down on the two men standing where the play found them.
Movement IV
The second act opens on the same road, and the tree has four or five leaves. Vladimir comes in alone and sings a round: “A dog came in the kitchen / And stole a crust of bread.” The song loops back on itself and cannot get out, and it is the play in small. Estragon has been beaten again in the night, and the day before is already in doubt: what happened, where, and whether anyone saw. Vladimir is sure of it; nobody else can confirm it.
Between the routines the two fall into a duet. “All the dead voices.” “They make a noise like wings.” “Like leaves.” “Like sand.” “Like leaves.” The duet is shared out a line at a time, as the cross-talk is, and it is the same instrument raised to elegy without a change of means. It ends where the dead voices end: “To have lived is not enough for them.” “They have to talk about it.” The double act of the music hall carries, at this moment, the whole weight of the dead, and the jokes before and after it are not interrupted for it.
Then Pozzo and Lucky return, the master blind, the servant dumb, and fall in a heap, and Pozzo calls for help. Vladimir rises to the occasion in words before he rises in deed: “Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.” He argues that the cries were addressed to all mankind, and that “at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.” He praises their constancy: “We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?” Estragon answers: “Billions.” The play keeps its deflation, and keeps the appointment too.
Movement V
Pozzo denies all knowledge of yesterday, and when he is pressed about time he will not have the question: “one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” The French image is the same: “à cheval sur une tombe”
“astride of a grave”. He and Lucky go. The man who orated about the twilight in the first act has become the twilight’s best sentence, and he speaks it in fury, to men he does not remember meeting.
Vladimir, left with Estragon asleep, takes up the image and cannot put it down. “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?” He finds Pozzo’s sentence in his own mouth, and the grave becomes a delivery room: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps.” Then: “The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener.” He looks at his sleeping friend and turns the look on himself: “At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?” The Boy arrives and denies that he came the day before. Vladimir asks him only to tell Mr. Godot “you saw me”.
At the end they try the tree again. Estragon takes off the cord that holds up his trousers, and the trousers fall round his ankles. “We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.” “And if he comes?” “We’ll be saved.” Then the first ending, with the lines exchanged: “Well? Shall we go?” “Yes, let’s go.” They do not move. Vladimir asks this time, and Estragon answers. Nothing has been settled, and nobody has left. The curtain falls on a third evening already implied, and on two men who have stayed together through both.
Act III · The Twelve
The structure passes the subtractive test outright. Without the second act the play is one bad evening; with it, the evening is a law. Without Pozzo and Lucky the waiting has no measure: they pass, and change, and the waiters do not. Lucky’s speech is the only thinking the play allows, and cannot go; the Boy’s two visits are its hinges. What gives way is inside the acts. The routines, the boots, the hat, the carrots and turnips, the insults, the exercises, are modular: any one could be lost or moved without loss, and their order is permitted rather than compelled. The subject, time filled by interchangeable business, defends them as a class but not each item, and that holds the axis here.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A life organised around a promised arrival becomes the practice of waiting, and goes on after hope has gone: “We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.” (II). Habit makes it bearable: “But habit is a great deadener.” (II). A cry for help is answered, if at all, by whoever happens to be there: “at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.” (II). Master and servant degrade on one rope, until the blind master is led by the dumb man he drove. These are meanings, not moods. Held off the top because the condition is stated at a generality that names no society.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Height is reached rarely, and by design. The play keeps to ground level, in farce and cross-talk, and rises a handful of times: Pozzo’s twilight speech, ending “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.” (I); the moon given a line of Shelley, “Pale for weariness.” (I); the duet of the dead voices (II); “Let us do something, while we have the chance!” (II); “They give birth astride of a grave” (II); “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?” (II). Lucky’s speech is terror played as comedy. These heights are as high as any in modern drama. Frequency is the charge: six or seven rises in a play whose method is deflation, each cut short by a joke or a fall.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, in the one place that bears the load: the play is an advent that does not arrive. A promised one, a messenger who comes twice, a judgement put off until tomorrow; every scene depends on it. Around that frame the archetypes are set in exact particulars. Two thieves, one saved, “It’s a reasonable percentage.” (I), stand behind two tramps. The Boy minds the goats and is not beaten; his brother minds the sheep and is: the judgement of Matthew 25 turned over. Pozzo, fallen, answers to Abel and to Cain: “He’s all humanity.” (II). The proof that the myth was built is that it became one, a proverb in many languages. Held a step down because the surrounding archetypes come as fragments, quoted and dropped.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The departure is total in kind: no plot, no exposition, no development and no outcome; characters with no history the play will confirm; a second act that declines to differ from its first. Vivian Mercier’s summary is the measure: “a play in which nothing happens, twice”. The stake was real. It was its author’s first play to reach a stage, staked on non-event in a small Paris theatre, and London audiences walked out. Held below the top because it was not made from nothing. Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles (1890) had staged a group waiting for a guide who does not come; Chekhov had made waiting a subject; Jarry, Pirandello and the music hall had broken the well-made play; and Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve reached a Paris stage in 1950, before Godot did.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Only theatre makes an audience wait in the same time as the characters, so the subject is not described but undergone: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” (I) is a line about the evening the audience is spending. The two acts make the form a series, and the repetition implies a third evening and a hundredth. Vladimir’s round song at the start of the second act, “A dog came in the kitchen / And stole a crust of bread.”, loops on itself and is the form in small. Beckett’s own novel of a wandering pair, Mercier et Camier, has the couple and none of this knowledge. Held a tenth below the top because the structure, once seen, is seen whole.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: seven decades of re-reading without exhaustion. The play has been read as Christian allegory and as its refusal; as existentialist, against its author’s disclaimers; as a play of the Occupation; as Hegel’s master and slave; as Irish and as postcolonial; as Cartesian body and mind. Martin Esslin opened The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) with its performance at San Quentin prison in 1957. The yield is in the text too, because its centre is a question the author declined to answer, who Godot is, and because memory in it cannot confirm a day: whether this is the place, whether the Boy came before. Each return finds it unsettled. Held below the top because the record is decades, not centuries.
Score: 9.4 / 10
A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The field is European drama, French and English, after 1945. The force is a reorganisation of what a play needs: it showed that a full evening could be held without plot or event, by presence, rhythm and the bare fact of two people waiting, and it joined the music hall to metaphysics without condescending to either. Held here because it reorganised one art, the theatre; beyond the stage it left a phrase in the language. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was immediate and wide, from Paris in 1953 to London in 1955 and Broadway in 1956; Esslin named the Theatre of the Absurd around it (1961); and Pinter (The Birthday Party, 1958), Albee, Havel, Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1966), Fugard, Shepard and Mamet wrote in its line.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-three years since the premiere, with no discount for age and no credit for time not yet elapsed. What makes the work survives whole, in two authorial texts, and it has not left the repertory in any decade. It has outlived the conditions that produced it: the postwar ruin, the vogue for existentialism and the Absurd as a movement have passed, and the play is staged as if none of them had been needed. The surface is almost bare of its moment: the Eiffel Tower “in the nineties” (I), a fair where a man may be sold, and Lucky’s mock-academics are the whole of it. Held below the oldest works for one reason only: the demonstration is a fraction as long.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the English, with the French beside it. The command is of a medium narrowed and then mastered: stichomythia timed like a music-hall double act; the pause and the silence written as part of the line; five registers, the tramps’ cross-talk, Pozzo’s rhetoric souring into “Up pig!”, Lucky’s torrent, the Boy’s “Yes Sir”, the lyric duets. Lucky’s speech is the virtuoso piece, a theological sentence, “a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension” (I), breaking down into its own repetitions. The self-translation is itself craft: “Rien à faire.”
“Nothing to be done.” The English is wider than the French idiom and opens the play on a sentence about action. Held a step down for range: the instrument is narrow by design, and some routines in the first act hang fire.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Estragon’s trousers falling round his ankles as the two try to hang themselves at the end, and Pozzo’s “They give birth astride of a grave” (II). They obey one law: the body fails, time is short, and both facts are funny and terrible at once. The apparent slips are that law at work. The tree comes into leaf overnight; Pozzo goes blind overnight and denies all knowledge of yesterday; the Boy denies he came before. Memory fails everywhere, so the world is consistent in being unconfirmable. The tonal range is real, from farce to elegy to metaphysical terror; the range of the world is not, and narrowness is not coherence. One road, one tree, two days, five men, no history the play will vouch for: a law that governs so little is little tested, and that holds the axis here.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders held are integrated, and fewer than at the summit. Consciousness and memory: what happened yesterday, and whether anyone saw. Friendship, a couple who can neither part nor stay: “Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!” (II). Master and servant, and the market where a man is sold: “I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him.” (I). Violence, in the beatings Estragon takes at night. The body: feet, bladder, hunger, age. The sacred: Godot, the thieves, the Gospels. The natural order: tree, moon and night. One structure, the wait, holds them all. What holds the axis here is what is absent: the family, women, the state, and history, glimpsed only. The claim on all mankind is made by abstraction, not accumulation.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.6, with The Swerve at 9.5, then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.4. A form that makes the audience undergo the wait it shows, and a series of two evenings that implies a hundred; a departure total in kind, staked on non-event, from a tradition that had supplied only pieces of it; seven decades of re-reading that leave its central question unsettled; and a medium narrowed and then mastered.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3, held by what the play leaves out: the family, women, the state, and history, which is glimpsed only. Every order it holds is held by the wait, and its claim on all mankind is made by abstraction rather than by accumulation. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.7, where the heights reach the top and are few by design, each cut short by a joke or a fall.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.6, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.1 and The Imperishable at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, The Unconcealment and The Imperishable by six tenths each. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Samuel Beckett’s play, scored as one work in two authorial languages. En attendant Godot, “pièce en deux actes”, was written in French, published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, in 1952, and first performed at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris, on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin, who played Pozzo. Waiting for Godot, “a tragicomedy in two acts”, is Beckett’s own English, published by Grove Press, New York, in 1954, and by Faber and Faber, London, in 1956. Neither text is a translation in the usual sense: no other hand stands between the author and either, and nothing in either is charged as a translator’s shortfall. The English is the text of record for the verbal axes and for quotation, because it is the later authorial state, made after the play had met its first stage, and because most of the play’s documented reach passed through it. The French is read beside it as a co-original; the structural axes are judged on the work, and the two texts do not differ on them. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Words are quoted only where they are certain, French above English where both are; everything else is paraphrased. Citations are by act: I and II. The pauses and silences as timed in performance, the sound of the two languages line by line, and the variants between the printed states of the text are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the length of Lucky’s speech and the running time, are not given.