“Waiting For Godot” is one of the first plays to be considered “Theatre of the Absurd”. This is due to its strange and new conventions; the play has no beginning, middle or end, at least not in the traditional sense. There is the play’s set, essentially barren, with the exception of a virtually leafless tree in the background. The set never changes; there is very little time for it to change, as there are only two acts, both almost identical in structure. Kenneth Tynan wrote ”It’s basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored” in his review of the play. We must also consider the audience that the play was written and performed for. Theatre was a popular past time for the middle and upper classes, perhaps it is not so strange that a story about clown-like tramps that

contemplate suicide was not quite what they were expecting or used to. Working class people may have been more likely to relate to the characters semi-pointless existence, but to an audience so used to seeing the working class portrayed on the stage as light-hearted comic relief it was an unwelcome change.

Of course there is also the fact that the play although described by its writer as a “tragicomedy” is nothing short of depressing, it’s a story about two men trying to pass the time till the Godot character arrives. As time passes it becomes ever more clear that he’s not going to arrive. This is different from other plays in that we have come to expect some kind of conflict and resolution at the end, but in “waiting for Godot” there is no resolution, it never delivers any change from the normality of the two men’s circumstances. This can’t have been easy to sit through in a theatre.

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