Theatre and Language: Samuel Beckett, 'Waiting for Godot' - Professor Belinda Jack

In depth analysis of the language tools in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and its numerous interpretations www.gresham.ac....
Beckett's Waiting for Godot has been interpreted in myriad ways. Some claim it is a work that explores the bleak absurdism of human life. Others have argued that it is an allegory of various kinds. These will be explored, but also the question as to what is it about the play that lends itself to such diverse interpretations? Plays are more than language. Is it in the relationship between language and the other aspects of theatre craft that the most convincing interpretation of the play lies?
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: www.gresham.ac....
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[@snakeboy7963]

My little thingy about waiting for godot has always been that "vladimir" and "estragon" are not random or absurd names but very intentional. Vladimir is the most common name in eastern europe. Estragon is the french word for tarragon, the implication being that his mother simply saw the word "estragon" in a cookbook and thought it sounded pretty i.e. a common stereotype of the lower class. Vladimir is a stock immigrant, a foreigner, and estragon is for lack of a better word "ghetto trash". Left behind by the culture the play debuted in.

[@mohamedelsayeed397]

٠ج

[@2msvalkyrie529]

Complete drivel !! Not even worth refuting !

[@adamgrimsley2900]

Well 9f course

[@Poemsapennyeach]

Levelled headed informative lecture. Thanks. Vivien Mercer was a friend of my fathers and my friend J. grew up in Beckett's old family home in Foxrock, Dublin.

[@wendywatson639]

Thank you most sincerely for a highly illuminating and thought-provoking lecture on a play that I have always loved, taught often, and delight constantly in finding new ways to think about it, but also to hold true to so much of what I respect Beckett for as an artist and playwright, and for sharing his perceptions with the world.

[@penelopegreene]

For some reason this particular video has a problem with its volume. No worry, I'll wait. Surely Gresham will fix it tomorrow...

[@gonzogil123]

Also, the way "I am happy, and You are Happy" are interpreted matters. You could play it with the absence of strength, and energy that poor, exhausted, and war torned people would display given they are being pushed out of existence, and playing it with less energy, and slowing down the tempo you would get something like "I am happý"...."You are happy"...."What do we do now that we are happy" as if stranged from the very same emotional accomplishment they had supposed to have undergone. A promise of happiness they accepted but left them lacking, wondering what was this ghost of a promise of happiness people were so intense about. Some happiness, some type of mental lie into which to insert yourself that in no way addresses other essential needs etc. What both interpretations of Godot have in common is that they are played as if the characters had the strength of chads that just came out of a gym. The tempo and fullness of sound that Beckett insisted was the guiding axiom of all his work is killed in the process. You can make an artistic choice you like, but Beckett's influences, his background, and the axioms he offers do allow for a presentation of the work where what is conveyed is primordial, fundamental, small in dosages, but crucial pillars upon which human may, or may not stand. And this reading of Beckett, this way of presenting his work is prohibited to the point where "Scholars on Beckett" like David Pattie censored the fact that a tree appears in one scene without leaves, and in the other with leaves. This clearly indicates cosmological, or, nature's clock independent of the characters offering a degree of objectivity. But Pattie thinks this is nonsense, because for him, in order to make sense, the audience needs to camp inside the theater for four months until spring arrives. It is pretty bad the level of censoring.

[@sombrezaafi8743]

That is an amazing lecture, ma'am. Very well researched and articulated. Loved it.

[@mark-j-adderley]

It’s not the despair, it’s the hope.

[@michaelskydancer3526]

Wonderful lecture; just wondering who "Molly" and "Maloney" are?

[@laylakomar9397]

Great lecture 👏👏

[@kermitfrog593]

I think all professors should be forced to perform in the plays they're going to lecture on before coming up with their lecture.

[@nigelpierre1991]

Forced?

[@TheBrendanio001]

Ok good lecture but can someone please explain why she pronounces Molloy as Molly and Malone as Malone-y?

[@wasifjalal6965]

because of potato

[@MegaLotusEater]

Cause she got her degree from the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry

[@Mazurka1001]

..also it is not go-dot, rather go-doh, the play being French and not Brutish.

[@Erkynar]

Wonderful lecture. Thank you so much. Now, of course, I have to read the damned thing in french...

[@edwardprice140]

What is....Waiting for Godot was the final question on "JEOPARDY" today, 11/14/2017 One of the 3 got it right. At 17.26 mark.

[@gonzogil123]

36:14 Again, you can restrict it to his main influence: Dante, Baudelaire, (he spoke Italian, and French) the Dadaists, Descartes (the mind) Joyce (modern myth, and the human mind again) etc. Restrict it, and see how he attempted, having nurtured himself from that context, to contribute something novel.

[@eggandscorpion]

Maloney Dies? MALONEY?

[@cardanibarbara1568]

Molloy, Malone dies

[@xyzllii]

Thanks again Prof. Belinda Jack. Very interesting. ps..But the quote...'silent as a flight of birds' is hilarious. The author obviously has never seen the flight of Starlings or Crows.

[@KinchMTG]

The poem actually goes "wordless as a flight of birds."

[@bellringer929]

Pozzo is pronounced as potzo?

[@cosmictravo]

Pizza, Pozzo

[@thebookdoc.writing.and.editing]

BS like this is why I walked out of the first seminar I attended in the PhD program I was accepted into, thanked the professor, and went and withdrew from the program.

[@gonzogil123]

35:30min But she must be aware that everyone from painters (dadaist movement including poetry) all they way to writers like Joyce were influenced by the set of revolutionary breakthroughs in psychoanalysis. Beckett lived in France, and translated poetry by Breton, and read Descartes (glimmers of the paranoiac mechanisms of the mind appearing in his meditations). He must have heard of Lacan, Picasso, and Salvador Dali. They would attempt to write in ways that would address the unconscious of the reader. There were other types of revolutions taking place. From Einstein, and quantum mechanics, to the second industrial revolution, to the revolution in psychoanalysis, and in art, and the October Revolution, not only in Russia, but attempts were made in what ended up as fascist Spain, Germany, and Italy etc

[@gonzogil123]

Yes, as a political economist that read a bit on psy-ops (logistics of perception by Virillo among others) it is interesting to see the timing of this interpretation of Beckett. I am pretty sure the people involved in the performances were paid handsomely, and this reflected itself on the ticket prices. The timing is interesting aka the degree of homelessness since 2008 world-wide. But these are not isolated, but rather systemic expressions of the propaganda system, you also have Zero Dark Thirty, or Roma, or The Apprentice (celebrating the guy that will push your family one step closer to the edge of material existence. I have heard he has been doing something else. Right after Capital as Media saw his star potential), and the usual illusory wholling operations like the Boston presentation of "Voices of a People´s History" so 1percenters would cloak themselves as leftists a yr when leftists economists (Dean Baker since 2002) were detecting the gaps on the bubble approach to the economy. People that finance the likes of Bush Jr, Foxx "You will never work on this town again..." as radical leftists. Pretty out in the open. Perfect timing to mock the homeless.

[@gonzogil123]

45:30aprox Noise, noise does not mean, or, signify, poems, and novels, or short-stories signify like music may signify, it may move you. All these people are too desperate to censor Beckett. Quite the level of hatred displayed for the man. No shift has been made since he was censored in Ireland for his first book "More Pricks than Kicks" "Ohhhhh, revenge claims Pattie, truth or incest" the answer is clear from the brave.

[@edwardprice140]

full play

[@wasifjalal6965]

can one form a link between sufism and this play?

[@saraaibar5630]

umm I dont think so. This is mainly related to theater of absurd.

[@nicolasdelaforge7420]

Interesting question - I traced what self/ no-self is in Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and in Jesus of Nazareth (not Christianity); and Beckett's self/ no self in his Trilogy 'Molloy', 'Malone Dies', 'The Unnamable' is very much one more such discovery of self/ no-self - and equally enlightened. Why did you say 'Sufism'? What in Sufism would you mention as having a connection to Beckett? Professor Jack is right to quote Archibald MacLeish: Beckett's self is found in that very description.

[@wasifjalal6965]

you sir, i like

[@wasifjalal6965]

the complete Trust in unseen... something on those lines

[@Johnconno]

Wasif Jalal No .

[@duartmclean5728]

Twig by twigg

[@VictorFinnigan]

I don't think the stone age people waited for Godot.

[@ivanjeremija9180]

Bad understanding of Beckett.👎

[@theredbaron5117]

Oh christ almighty, you HAD to include that abysmally self-indulgent rendition that Gandalf & Picard gave, didn't you!! What a mockery.

[@someoneelse293]

shhhhhh

[@apexxxx10]

This suck so! I really don't like this British woman's pronouncing "Go-duot" Sam Beckett would not have liked it! Bangkok-Johnnie,again. Directly from Thailand www.pattaytoday.net

[@apexxxx10]

Who is she anyway? Johnnie de Bangkok, asking!

[@2msvalkyrie529]

I wonder at what point did Beckett realise that he could pass off any old drivel ( ie Endgame etc ) as vitally important works of 20 th century drama. ? He probably hadn't realised quite how gullible our theatre critics were at the time of writing Godot.? Must have come as a pleasant surprise....?

[@gonzogil123]

54:40min What is interesting about the laughter about being a poet is that people do laugh, but what is the interpretation? art does not benefit, nor does it enrich your existence, actually it pushes you out of material existence: what is its use no?. But Beckett and Joyce clearly do not believe this. In what kind of society are the humanities, and the developing of the human mind not to be considered profitable? Did they not live through capitalists genocidal upheavals in Europe: the first world war, the civil wars against fascism, and the Second World War. Was there much appreciation for the humanities? What is it that makes the joke make sense? "Is it not the case that art will send you straight into death?" The standards with which we agree as to what it means to be "intelligent and successful", and how is it that one makes "dumb choices, and turns oneself into a failure of a human being" In this case, the laughter as an interpretative mechanism is ideological. Beckett is played to support capitalist ideology.

[@samueljean8261]

Excellent reading of that joke, it is true that even anti-capitalist art produced in a capitalist system will simply be absorbed and used to feed the latter.

[@gonzogil123]

@@samueljean8261 $2.2 trillion dollars of barrenes hence structural retreats, but diluted: the rock of castration. Even if they were not.

[@samueljean8261]

@@gonzogil123 what

[@gonzogil123]

@@samueljean8261 Yes, your answer leads me to find myself in 1:1 identity with that very same word. Unless you further specify I will still find myself in identity with the part of speech that landed upon my face as I checked your answer.

[@samueljean8261]

@@gonzogil123 do you mean to say that my original answer was not clear? Also i love the way you speak