WAITING FOR GODOT.

TECHNICAL STUDY OF THE PLAY.

Study of the stage directions.
1. What class of stage directions are the most frequent in this play? Paralinguistic
Didascalies, Kinesic Didascalies, Aspectual Didascalies...?

2. Search for some Kinesic and Proxenic Didasacalies.

3. Are the Lighting Didascalies clearly represented?

Study of the Drama and its structure.

4. In how many acts is the play divided? How many scenes does the play present?
Divide the play into logical parts.
5. Differences between the first and the second act.
6. Is the Presentation, the climax and the Denouement clearly presented?

STUDY OF THE DRAMA AND ACTION.

7. Is the play fully reliable or not?

STUDY OF THE DRAMA AND STAGE.

8. Comment on the setting in which the action takes place.
9. Study the scenery of the play. How do the objects that are used in the stage appear?

STUDY OF THE DRAMA AND TIME.

10. What is the verb tense used?
11. Do we have access to what happen before this situation?.

WAITING FOR GODOT.

STUDY OF THE DRAMA.
STUDY OF THE ACTION AND STRUCTURE.
1. How kind of action presents this play?.
2. Analyse the style of the play.
3. Different themes of the plot. Are there themes or only allusions?
4. Make a distinction between the realistic and the imaginative dimensions in the play.
5. Comment on the title of the play.

STUDY OF THE CHARACTERS

6. Describe the characters of Vladimir and Estragon. Explain the similitude and
differences.
7. Comment on the different attitudes of the characters with regards to religion.
8. Comment on the name of Lucky. Could be an irony?

STUDY OF THE CULTURAL REFERENCE OF THE

PLAY.
9. Literary and cultural movement in which is the play framed.
10. The author's brief biography.

Literary and cultural movement in which is

the play framed.
Theater of the Absurd.
Generic term used by the critical Martn Esslin in 1962 to classify certain playwrights
that wrote during the decade of 1950, whose work is considered like a reaction against the
traditional concepts of the western theater.
The term that is coined as alternative to that of anti-thtre or nouveau thtre,
has already passed to designate Samuel Beckett's theater, Eugne Ionesco, Fernando
Arrabal, Arthur Adamov's first works and Jean Genet mainly. Many of the concerns of
this theater find its theoretical motivation in Antonin Artaud's writings in The Theater
and its double (1938) and, somehow, in the notion brechtiana of Verfremdungseffekt
(alienating effect).
The theater of the absurd is not a movement or a school and the authors
present a heterogeneous panorama. What they have in common is the widespread
rejection of the realistic theater and its base of psychological characterization, it
structures coherent, it schemes and trust in the dialogic communication.
Through desfamiliarizacion processes and despersonalisation, these
playwrights, ferociously anti-Cartesian, disassembled the structures of the language, the
logic and the conventional conscience.
The accepted belief that the world makes sense (a world that little time before
had suffered the experiences of Hiroshima and the concentration fields) it is subverted
and replaced by a world where the words and the actions can be totally contradictory.
However, what intends is not as much the nonsense as a perpetual extension of the sense,
but showing a hidden reality and it makes bitter that underlies in the idea of happiness
and comfort in the way of life.
Each work believes its own implacable models of internal logic, sometimes
sad (like in the work of Beckett Waiting Godot, 1952), pathetic (also in Beckett End
Game, 1957), distressing (in the work of Ionesco The lesson, 1950), comedian (also in
another work of Ionesco, The bald singer, 1950), macabre (in the work of Arrabal The
cemetery of automobiles, 1957), humiliating (in the work of Adamov Professor Taranne,
1953), or it forces (like The Balcony happens in the work of Genet, 1957). All they,
however, have the presentation of a grotesque reality in common.
The question of the relating ones, aligned inside or outside of the stage, it
affects to three fundamental areas: the character (that can change of sex, personality or
status), the plot (that often is to circulate, it doesn't go anywhere and it rejects any
aesthetic resolution) and the objects (that they can proliferate until the point of expelling
to the characters, like raisin in the works of Ionesco, or they can also be reduced to the
minimum, like it happens to Beckett, to frame the thematic of the hole ).

Authors brief biography.

Samuel Beckett(1906-1989)
Poet, novelist and outstanding playwright of the theater of the absurd.Of Irish
origin, in 1969 it was rewarded with the Premio Nobel of Literature.
Beckett was born April of 1906, 13 in Foxrock, near Dublin. After attending a
Protestant school of middle class in the north of Ireland, he entered in the Trinity College of
Dublin, where he obtained the licentiate in Romances Languages in 1927 and the doctorate in
1931. Meanwhile he passed two years as teacher in Paris.
At the same time it continued studying the French philosopher Ren Discard and he
wrote his critical rehearsal Proust (1931) that would sit down the philosophical bases of his
life and his work.
It was then when he met the novelist and Irish poet James Joyce. In 1937 he settled
down definitively in Paris, but in 1942, after adhering to the Resistance, he had to escape from
the Gestapo, the police secret Nazi.
In the south of France, free of the German occupation, Beckett wrote the novel Watt
(that was not published up to 1953). At the end of the war he returned to Paris, where he
produced four big works: his trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone dies (1951) and The innombrable
(1953), novel that the own author considered his biggest achievement, and the play Waiting
for Godot (1952), his better work in opinion of most of the critics.
Great part of its later production at 1945 was written in French. Other important
works, published in English, are End game (1958), The last tape (1959), Happy Days (1961),
Act without words (1964), Not I (1973), That Time (1976) and Footfall (1976); the stories
Murphy 1938, and How it is (1964); and two collections of Poems (1930 and 1935).
One of their last works is Company (1980), where he summarizes his attitude of
exploring the unexplorable thing. As much in his novels as in his plays, Beckett centred his
attention in the anguish indisociable of the human condition that ultimately reduced to the
loneliness. Also he experimented with the language until only leaving his skeleton, what
originated an austere and disciplined prose, mellow of a corrosive humor and made happy
with the use of the jargon.

In Cover:
Scene of Waiting for Godot.
Waiting for Godot is one of the Irish writer's Samuel Beckett more celebrated
works. This scene shows the actors Stefan Wigger and Horst Bollmann interpreting
Vladimir and Stragon, the two characters who are waiting for Godot (1965, Schiller
Theatre, Berlin).

RAQUEL GARCA CALVO.

PATRICIA PIEIRO BARREIRO.

Study of the stage directions.

The more frequent stage directions are the Proxenic Didascalies that appear for
example in the Page 9: (Estragon, sitting on to low mond). As we can see the first
taking of contact that we have with the character of Estragon is through some physical
actions.
Page 9 (advancing with short), first taking of contact with the character of
Vladimir that is described or characterises for his way of walking.
Page 10 (Estragon tears at his boot), continuous with the previous action, for the
moment is the only thing that has certain coherence.
Page 10 (there is takes off his hat). Page 11 (there is takes off his hat again)
(Estragon with to supreme effort): they are clear examples that the only thing that
changes along the representation is the physical actions that ironically are static.
Page 58 (Estragon raises his head).
Page 70 (Estragon sleeps), we are talked about the wardrobe the same as with
the hats.
Pages 71-72 (Estragon takes Vladimir's hat).
These are some of the most important Proxenic Didascalies, now we will speak
to the Kinesic Didascalies.
Page 11 (there is smiles suddenly).
Page 16 (Gesture towards the universe).
Page 19 (Laugh of Vladimir).
Page 34 (Groaning).
Page 60 (Estragon groans).
Page 66 (Controling himself).
The mystery touch appears in this play by means of the Sounding Didascalies:
Page 21 (To terrible cry), this mystery at the end is not clarified, although Pozzo and
Lucky appear in scene.
The Lighting Didascalies appears stumped: page 6 (Evening).
Page 52 (The light suddenly fails), although these references are confused
because in the page 29 Pozzo affirms that it is still by day: Suppose you go now, while
it is still day .

Study of the drama and its structure.

The play is divided in two acts, without scenes predetermined due to the action
that is developed. The differences between the first and second act are scarce, that more
changes it is the scenery.
Presentation, climax and Denouement are not clearly presented, they are as two
independent stories.

Study or the drama and action.

The play mixes an imaginary and a real world, but it is not fully reliable.

Study of the drama and stage.

The setting is compound for a tree, page 6 (To country road. To tree).
Page 55 (Next day. Same cheats. Same place).
Page 57 (Tarragon boots front centers, heels together, toes splayed. Lucky's hat
at same place. The tree has four or five leaves).
As you leave, the only thing that varies is that the tree in the second act has
leaves.
The objects that are used during the development of the play are introduced in
the stage by the characters.
Page 20 (Vladimir rummages in his pockets, takes out to turnip).
Page 24 (Lucky puts down the bag, advancer, gives the coat).
Page 30 (there is puts his pipe in his pocket).
Page 69 (Taking string from his pocket).

Study of the drama and time.

The verb tense used is the present tense, and we dont have access to what have
happened in the past.