Waiting for Godot Trivia
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60 free Waiting for Godot trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Waiting for Godot is the play in which nothing happens, twice, and it turns out there is a great deal to ask about it. This quiz covers the text itself: the country road and the tree, Didi and Gogo's bowlers and boots, Pozzo's rope, Lucky's one speech, the boy who says Godot will surely come tomorrow, and the rope the two men do not have. It also covers Beckett's own cryptic hints, from the Caspar David Friedrich painting that inspired it to the racing cyclist called Godeau and the flat insistence that women 'don't have prostates'. Then it follows the play around the world: the shoestring 1953 Paris premiere, the German prisoner who translated it, the London walkouts of 1955 and the two Sunday reviews that saved it, the Miami fiasco billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents', San Quentin, Sarajevo, post-Katrina New Orleans, and casts from Bert Lahr and Mel Gibson to McKellen and Stewart and Bill & Ted on Broadway. A final stretch covers Beckett himself: Foxrock, Joyce, the pimp who stabbed him, the Resistance, the Nobel and Wisden. Easy questions suit anyone who studied the play at school; the expert tier asks what Estragon calls himself in the American edition. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the play and its author, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
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Q 01As Waiting for Godot opens, what is Estragon struggling to pull off?
A boot
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.
Q 02What is the original French title of Waiting for Godot?
En attendant Godot
En attendant Godot. Beckett wrote the play in French rather than his native English, and only afterwards translated it into English himself.
Q 03What pet names do Vladimir and Estragon call each other?
Didi and Gogo
Didi and Gogo. When Estragon dozes off, Vladimir shouts 'Gogo!' three times to wake him, and his excuse is simply: 'I felt lonely.'
Q 04What subtitle did Beckett give the English text of Waiting for Godot?
A tragicomedy in two acts
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.
Q 05A 1998 National Theatre poll named Waiting for Godot the 20th century's what?
Most significant English-language play
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.
Q 06How do both acts of Waiting for Godot end?
They agree to go but stay put
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.'
Q 07Where does Waiting for Godot take place?
On a country road by a tree
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.
Q 08What does the boy tell Vladimir and Estragon at the end of each act?
Godot will come tomorrow, not today
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.
Q 09What do Vladimir and Estragon lack when they consider hanging themselves at the end of Act II?
A rope
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.
Q 10Who directed the play's world premiere in Paris in January 1953?
Roger Blin
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.
Q 11At which Paris theatre did Waiting for Godot have its world premiere?
Théâtre de Babylone
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.
Q 12Which critic summed up Waiting for Godot as a play 'in which nothing happens, twice'?
Vivian Mercier
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.
Q 13Which critic coined the label 'Theatre of the Absurd' that Godot became the emblem of?
Martin Esslin
Q 21When a critic asked where the name Godot came from, Beckett once pointed to whom?
A racing cyclist called Godeau
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.
Q 22According to Beckett, how should the name Godot be pronounced?
With the stress on the first syllable
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.
Q 23Asked by an actor what Waiting for Godot was really about, Beckett said it was all what?
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.
Q 14Which painter's canvas of two figures gazing at the moon did Beckett call the source of Waiting for Godot?
Caspar David Friedrich
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.
Q 15Beckett said the one thing he was sure of was that Vladimir and Estragon wore what?
Bowler hats
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.'
Q 16Which comedy double act do Vladimir and Estragon's bowlers and hat games evoke?
Laurel and Hardy
Critic Gerald Mast called the hat routine and Lucky's inability to think without his hat 'obvious derivations' from the pair.
Q 17Which one-word command from Pozzo triggers Lucky's only speech, a torrent of pseudo-academic nonsense?
Think!
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'.
Q 18The first actor to play Lucky in Waiting for Godot gave him the symptoms of which condition?
Parkinson's disease
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.
Q 19Why did Beckett say Lucky was so named?
Because he has no more expectations
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.
Q 20Beckett noted he wrote Waiting for Godot in French, where the word for 'God' is what?
Dieu
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'.
Symbiosis
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.
Q 24Who directed the English-language premiere of Waiting for Godot at London's Arts Theatre in 1955?
Peter Hall
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.
Q 25Which two Sunday critics rescued London's first Waiting for Godot from closure?
Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson
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.
Q 26How did the 1955 Evening Standard awards settle a row over Waiting for Godot?
A one-off 'most controversial' prize
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.
Q 27Which official made the London production of Waiting for Godot cut the word 'erection'?
The Lord Chamberlain
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'.
Q 28In which city was the first US production of Waiting for Godot billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents'?
Miami
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'.
Q 29Which star of The Wizard of Oz played Estragon in the 1956 Broadway premiere of Waiting for Godot?
Bert Lahr
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.
Q 30A landmark 1957 performance of Waiting for Godot was given for 1,400 inmates at which prison?
San Quentin
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.