Waiting for Godot

This book, a play by Samuel Beckett, was, to be honest, pretty weird and I didn't overly enjoy it. It's about two men called Estragon and Vladimir who occupy the stage with what is obviously-concocted filler and fluff while they purportedly await the arrival of their acquaintance Godot, in some minimalistic subversion of what constitutes a 'play'. In an artistic sense, no doubt, it is a phenomenal work, one that when it was written shattered so many boundaries and expected conventional norms of play-writing that it can hardly not be called genius - but at the same time, it simply isn't very entertaining. It's like having a big dead fish called Nihilism rubbed slowly against your face for half an hour or so. The dialogue is extremely clever and philosophical, the use of language and expectation as playful as can be expected - but because the play as a whole is essentially an exercise in subverting the very form of itself, you end up with a relatively long thing in which nothing particularly interesting develops and nothing particularly engaging or thought-provoking happens apart from in schizophrenic little outbursts,* like sparks burped out of a fireplace, and if you are used to cultural-creative conceptual subversion of the thing itself by minimising the form of it, then even what made the play so special when it first came out is nothing mindblowing - I live in a generation surrounded by reflexive self-aware forms of media, and so a bit of metacommentary or poking the fourth-wall, sorry Samuel Beckett, just doesn't automatically make something great (c.f. Dan Harmon). Don't misunderstand, I cannot highly enough describe the artistic significance of Waiting for Godot in the history of western theatre, but even plays that didn't come out too long after it - for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, did very similar things, and far more (in my opinion) successfully, because the self-subverting form was tied to character and plot that enhanced these elements and made them funny and engaging instead of just an on-and-on display of experimental novelty.



* Lucky's absurdist monologue springs to mind. Moments like that do give the play something of a glimmering substance, but for the most part, as I've said, its content is just emptiness and futility circling themselves in a timeless and poignant and ultimately unentertaining (and not even overly edgy or interesting anymore) manner.