But that is EXACTLY what Godot does, if done correctly. I don’t know how to explaine it if you haven’t seen a good version but maybe this analogy will help.
The first time I read Tartuffe when I was in school, I didn’t get that it was a comedy. I read the play and though, “gee a wealthy family is driven to ruins by the evil Tartuffe that’s tragic not funny.” The happy ending was tacked on and felt forced. I couldn’t understand where the comedy was just by reading the text.
About a year later I had the priviledge to work on a production being run by a talented director with an extreamly gifted cast. The first night I was in rehearsal, it finally clicked and I “got it”. The act of seeing it play out put all of the pieces together for me in a way that I would not have been able to understand without having seen the play.
Godot may seem inaccesable in a reading if you aren’t used to reading plays (and don’t kid yourself, you have to learn how to read a play. It isn’t like reading a book.) but performed, it makes sense. The pieces fit together.
Beyond that, it broke a lot of ground for absurdism, which, as a (sort of) movement, is possilby one of the most influential movements in modern theater. Godot along with the works of Pinter, Ionesco and to a lesser extent Albee and Genet changed the way the game was played and laid the groundwork for playwrites as diverse as Sam Shepard and Christopher Durang.
I could go on for a while, but I think you get the idea. Godot is an important play for a lot of reasons.
Also, wasn’t Godot a French language play? Becket was Irish, but I am fairly sure it was written in French. I don’t know if it can count as the most influential English Language play.
I have been forced to sit through Waiting for Godot twice. Both times the stupid mother f@#$%& did not show up. I have contacted Amnesty International so that others would not have to go through what I did.
That’s what I thought. I have never thought of it as an english language play. Though I suppose since Beckett did the translation himself, maybe it counts.
Bump: There’s a halfway successful production of this going on in Seattle right now, for anyone who’s interested.
I say halfway successful because the show’s Pozzo isn’t very good and Lucky is horrible. The night I saw it, he bumbled through his long speech and managed to remember only half of it. A tragic butchering of a truly significant moment.
The rest of the show (i.e. Vladimir and Estragon alone on stage) is pretty good, though.
And yeah, it’s funny. It’s bleakly existential, but it’s also hilarious. If this tells you anything, the Seattle production was born from a clown class. In a lot of ways, the show is both a paean to the nobility of the clown, and an elegy for the ultimate pointlessness of their efforts.