Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

A landmark performance, balancing the monumental and the comic. Greece’s most internationally acclaimed theater director, Theodoros Terzopoulos undertakes to direct the outstanding Italian company Emillia Romagna Teatro.

“Nothing is more real than nothing,” Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) once stated, and with “Waiting for Godot” (1948), he hurled this “nothing” onto the stage like a meteor. Indeed, nothing remarkable in terms of action or plot occurs in this work by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish thinker, poet, and playwright—except for the two street vagabonds, Vladimir and Estragon, who, dressed in rags, stand beside a tree, speak of trivial matters, and encounter three equally odd characters while essentially waiting for someone else. That someone never arrives. Who, then, is the Godot of the title who never appears? A savior? Perhaps even God himself, as hinted by the English play on words (Godot, from God)? Beckett himself admitted that what truly interested him was not so much Godot, but the act of “waiting”.