Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's reworking of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts".
En attendant Godot, staging by Otomar Krejca, Avignon Festival, 1978
Vladimir and Estragon (The Doon School, India, 2010)
Estragon and the boy (University of Chicago, 2020)
En attendant Godot, 1978 Festival d'Avignon, directed by Otomar Krejča
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.
Beckett in 1977
Beckett's residence at Trinity College Dublin, pictured in 2021
Samuel Beckett Walk in Paris
Portrait of Samuel Beckett by Reginald Gray, painted in Paris, 1961 (from the collection of Ken White, Dublin)