Waiting for Godot

50th Anniversary of Samuel BeckettÂ’s Classic

Waiting for Godot

Directed by Natasha Kapper & Paul Sherman


“Nothing Happens, Nobody Comes, Nobody Goes”

Samuel Beckett’s first real triumph came on January 1953 when Waiting for Godot premiered at the Theatre de Babylone. In spite of expectations to the contrary, the strange little play in which “nothing happens” became an instant success. Beckett’s dramatic works do not rely on the traditional elements of drama. He trades in plot, characterization, and final solution, which had hitherto been the hallmarks of drama, for a series of concrete stage images. Language is useless, for he creates a mythical universe peoples by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the inexpressible. Beckett was the first of the absurdist’s to win international fame, and in 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The plot of Waiting for Godot is simple to relate. Two tramps are waiting by a sickly looking tree for the arrival of M. Godot. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot and gnaw on some chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave, who perform a grotesque scene in the middle of the play. A young boy arrives to say that M. Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow. The play is a development of the title, Waiting for Godot. He does not come and the two tramps resume their vigil by the tree, which between the first and second day has sprouted a few leaves, the only symbol of a possible order in a thoroughly alienated world. The act of waiting is never over, and yet it mysteriously starts up again each day. The action, in the same way, describes a circle. Each day is the return to the beginning. Nothing is completed because nothing can be completed. The despair of the play is the fact that the two tramps cannot not wait for Godot, and the corollary fact that he cannot come.

The Waiting for Godot actors at the Brisbane Arts Theatre are over the moon, for this production, they have gained what nearly everyone said was impossible: permission form Edward Beckett, nephew of the late Samuel Beckett, to change a word in the script.

Nicholas Gordon, who plays the tramp-poet Gogo (Estragon) was improvising in rehearsal when he came out with “ten bucks” where the script says “ten francs”. Co-director Paul Sherman liked the sound of it so got the theatre to email the Beckett Estate for permission to change the currency and also to change Gogo’s line about where the theatre toilets are. Paul was told he was wasting his times because, since Edward Beckett threatened legal action after Sydney’s Belvoir Street theatre made changes to the play last January, contract conditions have been rigorously tightened. For instance, women are excluded from acting in the play.

However, back came “best wishes” from Edward and permission to go for the Australian Currency, but the toilets had to stay at “end of the corridor, on the left” as the author wrote fifty years ago. Edward cryptically emailed that the line is “only intended to bring the audience back to the theatre space, not to tell where the toilets are”.

OPENS MONDAY JUNE 23RD, 2003 AT 7.30PM

Sundays 2pm / Mon & Tues 7.30pm
June 23rd to July 22nd

Ticket Prices: Adults $13.50 / Concession $10
Discounts for Group Bookings, School Groups & Institute of Modern Art members


Bookings: Arts Theatre Office - 3369 2344