Samuel Beckett’s infamous Waiting for Godot has spurred my imagination with respect to a rhetorical question I ask during my performance: What are we waiting for? I see this to be the question that Beckett was asking throughout his play however I think it is a question that does not have an answer.
David Smith says something very interesting of the two characters in the play: ‘They are in no particular time or place – nowhere and everywhere’ (Online, 2009). The idea that they are nowhere and everywhere fascinates me as I feel it describes time exactly. Though time can feel different to us all, and it can vary depending where in the world we are, it is everywhere. If we are experiencing a sleepless night, time seems to stand still. A minute feels like an hour, like it is going nowhere and we are just left to wait. The characters in the play know that Godot is not coming yet time tells them that they must wait, even if they are left waiting for nothing to happen. As my performance explains, it is the wait that takes the most time, no matter what it is that we are waiting for.
Though it represents a rather morbid response, my performance brings to light whether we are just waiting to die. Though we choose not to think of it like this, what else are we living for? We are born and one day we will die. It is the fact of life, yet it is not up to us when this will happen, only time will tell. While we are sad when this happens to a loved one, we shouldn’t be. We are sad because we think that something bad has happened to someone we love but in reality the bad bit happened a long time ago. If someone becomes ill you are left to wait and this is the hard bit. Watching someone suffer and waiting for the ‘worst’ to happen. It may be the worst for us but for the person who passes it is the best and this is what we should remember. We feel sorry for ourselves but we shouldn’t. The wait is over and that is the best thing for everyone.
I will leave this post with a quote from my script: ‘As one passes the wait for another begins, but we cannot spend our next bit of time worrying or waiting for it to happen’.
Works Cited
Smith, David. (2009). The Guardian, The Observor. Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/mar/08/samuel-beckett-waiting-for-godot Accessed: Friday 10 May 2013.
Image from Google Images. Google Image Search: Waiting for Godot. Online: https://www.google.co.uk/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi Accessed on: Friday 10 May 2013.