"An assault against words"
ESTRAGON: "Charming spot. Inspiring prospects. Let's go." VLADIMIR: "We can't". ESTRAGON: "Why not?" VLADIMIR: "We're waiting for Godot."
The coming year will bring its share of centenaries and anniversaries but few will be as significant as next Sunday's. On 5 January 1953, the tiny Theatre de Babylon in Paris premiered a play called Waiting for Godot by the relatively unknown Irish writer Samuel Beckett. The bemused audience in the half-filled auditorium were not aware that the two-act comedy they were witnessing was altering the nature of theatre. After all, the playwright had dispensed with such conventions as character and plot. Predictably, the critics were enraged and it took years for their anger to abate. When it did, the play was seen for what it was: original and subversive.
Central to the idea of Godot is Beckett's belief that words are inadequate to express our deepest feelings. "If you really get down to disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable," he once wrote. Compared to music, he felt that words were imprecise and crude when describing emotions. That's why he felt he needed to create a new form of theatrical-linguistic expression to convey his art. "An assault against words in the name of beauty," is how he once described his work.
But Beckett didn't stop with the destruction of language. In Godot, he mercilessly demolishes our notions of time and our illusions of achievement. There's only the present, he says, and it's not so much that resistance is futile as existence is futile. "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, and then it's night once more," declares Pozzo in Godot. Not exactly the kind of stuff that those charged with making five-year plans want to hear.
On Sunday, Dublin's Gate Theatre will stage a gala version of Waiting for Godot that is expected to be unequalled in 2003. It will then run for four weeks in honour of the Dubliner who thought in new dimensions.
