60 Fun Facts About Waiting for Godot

As Waiting for Godot opens, what is Estragon struggling to pull off?

A boot. Estragon gives up with the play's first line, 'Nothing to be done', and Vladimir answers as if he had meant life in general.

What is the original French title of Waiting for Godot?

En attendant Godot. Beckett wrote the play in French rather than his native English, and only afterwards translated it into English himself.

What pet names do Vladimir and Estragon call each other?

Didi and Gogo. When Estragon dozes off, Vladimir shouts 'Gogo!' three times to wake him, and his excuse is simply: 'I felt lonely.'

What subtitle did Beckett give the English text of Waiting for Godot?

A tragicomedy in two acts. The comedy is pure slapstick, with pratfalls and dropped trousers, played by two men who discuss hanging themselves in both acts.

A 1998 National Theatre poll named Waiting for Godot the 20th century's what?

Most significant English-language play. At the 1955 London first night, its director recalled, the line 'Nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful' drew a loud 'Hear, hear' from the stalls.

How do both acts of Waiting for Godot end?

They agree to go but stay put. Each act closes on the same exchange, 'Well, shall we go?' and 'Yes, let's go', followed by the stage direction 'They do not move.'

Where does Waiting for Godot take place?

On a country road by a tree. The tree is bare in Act I and has four or five leaves in Act II, though the script says only a single night has passed.

What does the boy tell Vladimir and Estragon at the end of each act?

Godot will come tomorrow, not today. In Act II the boy insists he has never been before, and Vladimir finally lunges at him as he runs off.

What do Vladimir and Estragon lack when they consider hanging themselves at the end of Act II?

A rope. They test the cord holding up Estragon's trousers instead: it snaps, the trousers drop round his ankles, and they promise to bring a proper length tomorrow.

Who directed the play's world premiere in Paris in January 1953?

Roger Blin. Two weeks before opening he still had no Pozzo, so the lean director strapped on a false belly and played the stout tyrant himself.

At which Paris theatre did Waiting for Godot have its world premiere?

Théâtre de Babylone. Its manager was already short of money and took the play anyway, saying that if the house had to die it should die beautifully; it closed for good in 1954.

Which critic summed up Waiting for Godot as a play 'in which nothing happens, twice'?

Vivian Mercier. He meant it as praise: in a 1956 review he said Beckett had pulled off 'a theoretical impossibility', a play where nothing happens that still keeps audiences glued to their seats.

Which critic coined the label 'Theatre of the Absurd' that Godot became the emblem of?

Martin Esslin. He used 'absurd' in the sense Camus gave it in The Myth of Sisyphus, life as something without purpose, and put Beckett at the head of the playwrights he grouped under it.

Which painter's canvas of two figures gazing at the moon did Beckett call the source of Waiting for Godot?

Caspar David Friedrich. Beckett said it standing in front of Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, though he may have meant the earlier Two Men version, which he had pointed out to friends.

Beckett said the one thing he was sure of was that Vladimir and Estragon wore what?

Bowler hats. His first director recalled that Beckett could hear the pair's voices but not picture them: 'The only thing I'm sure of is that they're wearing bowlers.'

Which comedy double act do Vladimir and Estragon's bowlers and hat games evoke?

Critic Gerald Mast called the hat routine and Lucky's inability to think without his hat 'obvious derivations' from the pair.

Which one-word command from Pozzo triggers Lucky's only speech, a torrent of pseudo-academic nonsense?

Think! Lucky can only do it with his hat on, so the others end the tirade by pulling the hat off, and Pozzo tramples it to make sure there is 'an end to his thinking'.

The first actor to play Lucky in Waiting for Godot gave him the symptoms of which condition?

Parkinson's disease. Jean Martin asked a doctor friend what could explain Lucky's voice, then trembled and drooled through the role, and one early audience whistled the curtain down after his monologue.

Why did Beckett say Lucky was so named?

Because he has no more expectations. 'I suppose he is lucky to have no more expectations,' Beckett said of Pozzo's driven servant, a dry contrast with the two who cannot stop hoping.

Beckett noted he wrote Waiting for Godot in French, where the word for 'God' is what?

Dieu. Beckett told the actor Ralph Richardson that if by Godot he had meant God he would have said God, which, he reported, 'seemed to disappoint him greatly'.

When a critic asked where the name Godot came from, Beckett once pointed to whom?

A racing cyclist called Godeau. Beckett followed bike racing and described him to Hugh Kenner as a bald veteran who kept placing; the tale of a crowd still waiting for him after a race is less well attested.

According to Beckett, how should the name Godot be pronounced?

With the stress on the first syllable. Beckett insisted on 'GOD-oh' even from American actors, who lean towards 'guh-DOH', and a company he coached was told to hit the first syllable every time.

Asked by an actor what Waiting for Godot was really about, Beckett said it was all what?

Symbiosis. That was all Peter Woodthorpe, the first British Estragon, could get out of him, and it fits two tramps who keep proposing to part and never manage it.

Who directed the English-language premiere of Waiting for Godot at London's Arts Theatre in 1955?

Peter Hall. He was 24 and suspected he got the job because nobody else would touch it; in rehearsal he admitted he hadn't 'the foggiest idea' what some of it meant.

Which two Sunday critics rescued London's first Waiting for Godot from closure?

Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson. After hostile daily notices the theatre's owner meant to close on Saturday; the director begged him to wait for the Sunday papers, and Hobson kept returning to the play for weeks.

How did the 1955 Evening Standard awards settle a row over Waiting for Godot?

A one-off 'most controversial' prize. Judges led by the conductor Malcolm Sargent threatened to resign if it was named best play, so a new title was invented for it, and that prize has never been given again.

Which official made the London production of Waiting for Godot cut the word 'erection'?

The Lord Chamberlain. Britain's stage censor had no power over the members' club theatre where the play opened, so his cuts bit only when it moved to the public West End, where 'Fartov' also became 'Popov'.

In which city was the first US production of Waiting for Godot billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents'?

Miami. Holidaymakers who had been promised a comedy walked out in droves, and the production's star said playing it there was like 'doing Giselle in Roseland'.

Which star of The Wizard of Oz played Estragon in the 1956 Broadway premiere of Waiting for Godot?

Bert Lahr. The Cowardly Lion was the one lead kept on when the director and the rest of the cast were replaced after a disastrous try-out, and he went on to record the role for Columbia.

A landmark 1957 performance of Waiting for Godot was given for 1,400 inmates at which prison?

San Quentin. The play was picked largely because it has no women in the cast, and it landed so well that inmates founded their own drama workshop, whose leader Rick Cluchey later worked alongside Beckett.

In which country did a prison inmate translate and stage Waiting for Godot in 1953, then write to Beckett?

Germany. At Lüttringhausen prison an inmate got hold of the French first edition, translated it himself and staged it, then wrote to Beckett of men spending life 'waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting'.

Beckett objected to all-female casts of Waiting for Godot with what four-word explanation?

Women don't have prostates, he said, since Vladimir's bladder keeps sending him offstage; he tried to stop an all-female Dutch production in 1988, and his estate fought others in court for years after his death.

Where did Beckett direct Waiting for Godot himself for the first time, in 1975?

The Schiller-Theater in Berlin. He directed it in German as Warten auf Godot, and the cuts and changes he made there fed the revised text that later productions draw on.

Which two stage veterans played Estragon and Vladimir in the West End's 2009 Waiting for Godot?

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. The X-Men co-stars had shared a stage only once before; the run did so well that it returned to the Haymarket in 2010, and the pair took it to Broadway in 2013.

Who directed Robin Williams and Steve Martin as Estragon and Vladimir at Lincoln Center in 1988?

Mike Nichols. The brief run in a small house sold out before it opened, but Frank Rich wrote that audiences 'will still be waiting for a transcendent Godot' long after the clowns had gone.

Which film duo reunited to play Estragon and Vladimir on Broadway in 2025?

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. The revival was Reeves's own idea: he pitched it to his Bill & Ted co-star first, and the two friends then took it to the director Jamie Lloyd.

Which writer directed a candlelit Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo in the 1990s?

Susan Sontag. In the summer of 1993, with no electricity, she lit the stage with a few candles, and she put three pairs of Vladimir and Estragon on stage at once.

In which devastated neighbourhood was Waiting for Godot staged outdoors in 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina?

The Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Artist Paul Chan staged it free in the middle of an intersection, with New Orleans-born Wendell Pierce of The Wire as Vladimir, before moving on to a front yard in Gentilly.

A young Geoffrey Rush played Vladimir in Sydney in 1979 opposite which flatmate as Estragon?

Mel Gibson. Mad Max reached Australian cinemas that same year, yet its leading man was still a struggling stage actor, only two years out of drama school.

Which comedy duo from The Young Ones played Vladimir and Estragon in the West End in 1991?

Filmmaker Derek Jarman designed the set.

What did Beckett say after watching the BBC's 1961 television Waiting for Godot?

'My play wasn't written for this box', he told the friends he had watched with, but 'for small men locked in a big space'; he later refused outright to let it be filmed, even with Peter O'Toole attached.

When Beckett won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, what did his wife Suzanne call the news?

A catastrophe. She feared what fame would do to so private a man; he made no public statement, stayed away from the ceremony and sent his publisher to collect the prize.

Beckett is the only Nobel literature laureate to have played which sport at first-class level?

Cricket. He played two first-class matches for Dublin University; in an often-told story, a friend heading to Lord's with him on a sunny day said it made one glad to be alive, and Beckett replied that he wouldn't go that far.

In which Dublin suburb was Beckett born in 1906?

Foxrock. The suburb never left him: its railway station and the nearby Leopardstown racecourse are the setting of his radio play All That Fall, where the station goes by the name Boghill.

Which writer did the young Beckett assist in Paris, reading to him as his eyesight failed?

James Joyce. Beckett also did research for the book that became Finnegans Wake, though he was never Joyce's secretary, as is often said; the friendship cooled when he turned down the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia.

In January 1938 Beckett was nearly killed in Paris when he was stabbed by whom?

A pimp named Prudent. Beckett had brushed off his pestering in the street; when he later asked the man why he had done it, the only answer he got was 'I do not know, sir.'

Beckett received which decoration in 1945 for his work as a courier for the French Resistance?

The Croix de Guerre. His cell was betrayed in 1942 and he fled south with Suzanne to the village of Roussillon, yet for the rest of his life he waved his Resistance work away as 'boy scout stuff'.

Which Paris publisher first put Waiting for Godot into print, in its original French, in 1952?

Les Éditions de Minuit. The 'Midnight Press' began as a clandestine Resistance publisher under the Occupation, and its head Jérôme Lindon stayed Beckett's French publisher for the rest of his life.

In the American edition of Waiting for Godot, what name does Estragon give when Pozzo asks?

Adam. Pozzo isn't even listening when he says it; the French original has 'Catulle' and the first British edition 'Catullus', which Beckett changed because, he said, he was 'fed up with Catullus'.

Vladimir says he and Estragon should have jumped hand in hand from which landmark, back in the nineties?

The Eiffel Tower. 'We were respectable in those days,' he says; now they wouldn't even be let up, one of the few glimpses of the better lives the pair have shared in what he reckons is fifty years together.

What job does the boy say he does for Mr Godot?

Goatherd. He minds the goats and is never beaten, while his brother minds the sheep and is; critics read it as the Bible's parable of the sheep and the goats turned upside down, since there it is the goats who are punished.

What does the boy say Godot has, when Vladimir asks about his appearance in Act II?

A white beard. Lucky's tirade in Act I had spoken of 'a personal God ... with white beard', and a shaken Vladimir can only ask Christ for mercy; asked what Godot does, the boy says he does nothing.

Where is Beckett buried?

Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. Dublin-born, he had made Paris his home for half a century, and he was buried there after a private funeral beside his wife Suzanne, who had died five months earlier.

Rehearsing his own 1975 production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett told an actor that everything in it was what?

A game. 'It is a game in order to survive,' he said, so a moment such as all four men lying on the ground had to be played artificially, like ballet, and never as an imitation of real life.

Beckett said he began writing Waiting for Godot as a relaxation, to get away from what?

His novels. He called them 'the awful prose I was writing at that time'; deep in a trilogy of them, he wrote the play in under four months as a break, and it was the break that made him world famous.

By what name does the boy address Vladimir?

Mister Albert is how the boy greets him, and Vladimir just answers 'Yes', never correcting the name.

What afflictions do the whip-wielding traveller and his porter have when they return in Act II?

Blindness and muteness, respectively: the master who drove his porter with a whip now follows blindly behind him, and both fall in a heap when they collide.

In Act I, Estragon asks Pozzo for ten of which currency?

Francs. When Pozzo wonders aloud what he can do for the pair, Estragon says even ten would be a help; Vladimir snaps 'We are not beggars!', and Estragon drops his price to five.

In Act I, which vegetable does Vladimir finally dig out of his pockets for the hungry Estragon?

A carrot is what Estragon asks for, but at first all Vladimir can find in his pockets are turnips, and Estragon bites into one by mistake.

In the 1992 Sesame Street parody 'Waiting for Elmo', which two Muppets do the waiting?

Telly and Grover wait in vain, as Elmo never shows up; even the scenery gives up, announcing that it does not understand the play and walking off.