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    Waiting for Godot
    Waiting for Godot
    Waiting for Godot
    Audiobook2 hours

    Waiting for Godot

    Written by Samuel Beckett

    Narrated by Seán Barrett, David Burke, Nigel Anthony and Terence Rigby

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century, was born on 13 April 1906. He died in 1989. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, but the most popular of them all will be, without doubt, the play with which he first made his name, Waiting for Godot. It opened the gates to the theatre of the absurd as four men appear on the stage, apparently with purpose but (perhaps) waiting for someone called Godot. It is stark, funny, bemusing and still deeply affecting half a century since its first production. In this new recording for audiobook, John Tydeman, for many years head of BBC Radio Drama, takes a fresh look at one of the milestones in Western drama. It follows the highly acclaimed recordings of Beckett’s Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable published by Naxos AudioBooks.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateFeb 1, 2006
    ISBN9789629546816
    Waiting for Godot

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    Reviews for Waiting for Godot

    4/5

    254 ratings83 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I am being very kind here in giving Beckett's famous play two stars out of five. The play may or may not be about existentialist despair, the meaninglessness of life, or simply the playwright's thumbing his nose at dramaturgy. It is for me the equivalent of an oversized blank canvas with a single tiny dot hanging in the modern art museum of your choice which one may take for commentary on the futility of life, the isolation of every human being in a post-modern world or some similarly pretentious, futile attempt at explaining what could be simple fly poop or, just as likely and of equal intrinsic value, a metaphor for the artist's lack of the slightest scintilla of talent or imagination and the curator's boundless gullibility. At least one can analyze and dismiss the latter immediately without experiencing the existential angst of a wasted evening at the theater or (seemingly) endless hours reading and re-reading the former while waiting for something, anything (meaningful or not) to happen.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Going to the party as Godot and never showing up.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      What a relief!

      I had been under the impression that Waiting for Godot was a religious allegory, where Estragon and Vladimir represented the two thieves crucified with Jesus, or society in general; Lucky represented Jesus; Pozzo represented organized religion; and the whole thing was some tortured, surreal / comedic commentary on the pointlessness / necessity of faith. Gar, I thought, if I wanted earnest religious allegory I could just read Life of Pi again, borrrrrrring.

      "It's never the same pus from one second to the next."

      But then I read it, and it's not that at all. It turns out it's just about kinky gay BDSM relationships: Pozzo and Lucky kindle latent longings in Vladimir and Estragon that they try and fail to act on. You can pretty much just watch the Gimp scene from Pulp Fiction; it's exactly the same story. Whew! This is way sexier than I'd been led to believe.

      "Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn't too much to ask of him."

      This isn't really my scene, but I appreciate the exploration of it. To each his own!

      "We are all born mad. Some remain so."

      Recommended soundtrack: "One More Try," George Michael.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Hobos Vladimir and Estragon wait and wait, discuss suicide, religion and violence, meet the cruel Pozzo and his robotic slave Lucky, try on shoes and hats and eat vegetables.While reading this I wondered why this play, first performed in 1952, hadn't been the catalyst to the new wave of British theater rather than Osborne's Look Back In Anger, which came four years later. Waiting For Godot was certainly a radical play for it's time, with surrealists bits of disjointed conversation, references to random violence, slavery and Vladimir's urinary problems. Then, at the back I saw the answer. This play had it's first run in Paris, in French, where Irishman Beckett had lived much of his life.The characters are so well-defined that I could hear them speaking, and now I need to see it live. But done by professional actors, as I could see bad actors making a mess of this.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      As postwar "what the fuck now?" this gets five stars. Six. As anything else it gets one, or zero, or a spider or a rat. So we average it out to three, minus one for the cult, plus a half for the riveting potential of what I'm gonna call the "bugeyed reading" and another half for the comedic frisson of, let's say, the "Monty Python"" reading (or maybe "Animaniacs," with Estragon as Wacko). I'm getting pretty sure comedy is the only place for existentialism anyway.So. Plus another half if somebody ever figures out how to blend the two readings, I thinks, but for now, three stars. Math.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Let me start by saying that I do not like angst-ridden or depressing books. Several of my family members and myself have all dealt with depression, and some of us are still struggling. I do not need to read more about depressed people. Really, I just don't. So why did I put this book on my list? It wasn't like I didn't know what it was like. No, it was because I saw part of it, the first act, on TV and I was mesmerized. I couldn't get it out of my mind. But I never got around to reading it until this year.The plot is simple. Two men, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting for a third man named Godot to arrive. That's it. While they wait, they try to pass the time. Godot never arrives.It sounds like a pointless play, doesn't it? But it adds up to so much more. I am not a theater critic, but I found so much to connect with in this play. This play, to me, is about the human struggle to find meaning in life, and about what happens if you NEVER find that meaning. What then?This is a line I loved, from Estragon to Vladimir."We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"I am a person with a great faith in my purpose in life. And yet, I think because of that perhaps, I am also a person who knows what it means to question whether there really is any meaning at all in my own life. I think that a person of faith has greater doubts than a person without. A person of faith knows that God exists, but knows that He is not present for us. A person without faith knows that there is no God, and doesn't expect anything else. So for me, I have struggled over and over with trying to find my own purpose here in this life.The blurb on the front reads, "One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished." The two characters wait for something to happen. In the meantime, they fuss with their clothes, they have a little something to eat, they meet other people and try to interact, but above all, they do nothing, because there is nothing to be done. And yet, they keep coming, every day, to wait.Not everyone will appreciate this play. I tried to explain it to my daughter and she just didn't see the point in it at all. I'm not sure why it appeals to me. I think it is the fact that at the end of the play, Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting. I know that waiting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of my favorite plays of all time. Two men, wait for Godot, who never shows. Instead, Godot sends a messenger to tell the two men he will come tomorrow. They pass the time with two quirky, wayward travelers who do not wait with them. Beckett is a hilarious writer. He is very good with dialogue and word play, such as when Pozzo asks "How do you find me?" and Gogo replies "Tray Bong, tray tray tray bong." meaning tres bon, or very good.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Existentialism served raw! After reading The Stranger by Camus, I did not think that existentialism could be more plainly defined in prose, but Godot has left me debating (and yes, also waiting). Beckett, it seems, is also magically able to actualize ennui as a comedy -- as he puts it, a tragicomedy. But moreover, the piece does well to capture a subtlety of the existential mood: man's inextinguishable, incorrigible hope.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The story revolves around two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who have been told they must wait for Godot, though they aren't sure who he is or what he looks like. They miss many opportunities because they turn them down in anticipation that they might miss Godot. This play has the advantage of simple one line dialog that makes it a good choice for the middle school LMC, but also invites deeper interpretations which makes is suitable for the high school LMC as well. This is a very nice combination of attributes because the work can be used by classes with a wide range of abilities each understanding and interpreting the work at their own level.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Beckett isn't super exciting on the page, so I'll have to see one of his plays on stage sometime. I think I liked this better than Endgame.

      ETA: Maybe I would like this play even better if many of the good bits hadn't been borrowed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which is of course "Waiting For Godot, Now With Shakespearean Metafiction (and 20% More Bromance)." As well as by, you know, all of the other postmodern fiction and drama out there. We totally should have read it in high school! It would have blown my mind.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      His own translation of his original French text is indeed brilliant, and doubly so for English being his native language.

      In and of itself, it is one of the indispensables.

      -- Who have you seen performing it?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It starts to make more sense when you've read it more than once. It's not necessarily funny when you read it, though. unless you have a really good imagination.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A very clever and enjoyable meditation on the dullness and lack of affect in modern experience.

      The characters exist, and that's about it, struggling at all turns to

      Philosophically, the novel seems to play on Shakespeare's notion that 'all of life if a stage,' while reversing that axiom, essentially tackling The Meaning of Life (yes, in capital letters, damn you) thru the guise of 'This Stage is All of Life.'

      They wait, they kid, they wait. Inaction, ineffectual and too defeated and confused to even hang themselves.

      I read this directly after Bernhard's The Loser (a writer often compared to Beckett) and found that WAITING FOR GODOT deals with some of the same topics of disappointment, longing and anxiety in a much more clever and enjoyable way.

      With some of Beckett's perplexing and hilarious lines, and by referencing the play's famous reliance on inaction, you can almost picture the playwright hiding behind the curtains with his middle finger raised to the audience.

      This is how I would like to imagine God surveying His world.
    • 5/5
      A play that can be called true genius. Word play is delightful, and the characters are quirky and original. It does lose a bit in the reading as the action must be visualized rather than seen, but reading it makes it easier to catch all the double entendres and language tricks that sort of pass over you while watching the play staged. This is a play for the ages; the central theme does not date, and the metaphor is subtle enough to be enjoyed, but not so subtle that it is overlooked altogether. A must for any theatre aficianado.
    • 2/5
      Makes you think, but also makes you wish it was a much shorter play.
    • 3/5
      Klassiek toneelstuk over de absurditeit van het leven, de schraalheid van het bestaan, de onmenselijkheid van de mens, de onmogelijkheid van communicatie, enz. De eerste lectuur heeft een groot schokeffect; tweede lectuur 20 jaar later stelt wat teleur.Een eerste keer in het Engels gelezen, op 17 jaar; vond het geweldig!
    • 2/5
      I understand that this is considered a masterpiece, and I get it. Having said that, I can't see myself ever picking it up again. Been there, done that, moving on.
    • 1/5
      A nonsensical play about nothing does not inspire me to spend extra time thinking about its possible meanings. That would be like someone preparing me a microwave dinner and in response I re-wash all of their clean dishes while raving about the fine cuisine. I freely admit my ignorance on the subject, but still I suspect that on some alternate plane of existence the ghost of a famous playwright is chuckling steadily away at this particular feat. And now I have already wasted too much time thinking about it. Goodbye.
    • 4/5
      Crazy, tough, funny, makes you think and analyze if what we think is "normal" is really so. Maybe we all are just waiting for Godot.
    • 2/5
      I know this is one of those works that are supposed to be masterpieces, but it did absolutely nothing for me. To be fair, I'm not a theater person, and I never got the appeal of absurdist works or anything else along those lines. I got about a third of the way into this and just couldn't stand to read it anymore, it drove me nuts. If you can appreciate that kind of stuff then I guess I can see why so many people love it, I'm just not one of them.
    • 3/5
      This entire play reads like one scene. The reader/audience does not really even know WHY Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot (a job? a payment? some other agreement?), or why they feel they must stay, or will hang themselves if Godot never comes. While there are definite moments of comedy (namely the hat scene--I don't find a man leading another man by a rope to be funny), I really just don't get this. Nothing happens, nothing is resolved. Nothing changes other than boots and hats.
    • 2/5
      I read this in college. I didn't get it. I appreciate that I should see it rather than just read it, and if the chance comes up, I may do so.
    • 2/5
      It never went anywhere....

      Seriously, I got it. There's no god, people are tools. Now, say it again, and keep on saying it.
    • 5/5
      Great play where nothing happens, twice. Hilarious, philosophical and full of uncertainty lending it's self to much creative interpretation. Good audio and energy from actors. Might come back again soon.
    • 5/5
      There is an incredible inequality in the very concept of a review: that of the difference between author and reader. This inequality leads to comedy at its extremities: high school students dismissing works of literature upon reading the first few pages, and spark-noting the rest; the same principle applies to think pieces on social media by those who don’t use it. The written medium especially allows for this transfer; the relative permanence of a physical page allows writing to be preserved unchanged much longer than any virtual form so far.
      And I approach this book with a keen awareness of that inequality. Waiting for Godot was good the first time; he was bitingly apt and perfectly on target the second. I read it while wandering the streets of Charlottesville, in parks, on a bus, in refreshing cool of the library’s air conditioning and the shade of McGuffey Park. It seemed an odd parallel of Estragon and Vladimir’s conversation, which was physically in one location but topically ranged incredibly. This makes the odd and apt witticisms always in context, and plays delightfully with the limits of theater not physically but verbally. I would love to see a performance.
    • 4/5
      I quite enjoyed this play. it felt meaningful at the same time pointless. a lot I couldn't understand, but I learned the writer made the message of the book obscure on purpose. he gives you plenty of room to inscribe your own meaning, this gave me a sort of understanding of the play that felt personal. and honestly, I am quite satisfied with the way it ended.
    • 5/5
      "Nothing happens. Twice," said Beckett scholar Thomas Cousineau. Samuel Beckett called Waiting for Godot "that mess of a play", and referred to it as a minor, "left hand" work. I could very easily call Waiting for Godot my favorite play. In Beckett's work nothing can be taken for granted, and nothing is presented without motive. Beckett attempts to break down the distinctions between his characters and the audience, and challenges conventional dramatic presentation with his focus on the Theatre of the Absurd. My favorite theme for analysis and discussion is Beckett's portrayal of identity and the requirements for existence, but the copious themes and motifs at work within the short play make Waiting for Godot a fantastic piece to work with in the classroom. I teach Beckett's famous tragicomedy every semester, and I look forward to the experience time and again.
    • 4/5
      This is a strange story. I love the main characters, I love the interplay between them, and quite frankly, I love how essentially nothing happens.

      It's a strangely claustrophobic story for me, and that is heightened with the revelations of the second day.

      But really, it makes no damn sense. But that's okay.

      Though, throughout the story, I couldn't help myself and I found myself continually looping back to a single thought: This story makes so much more sense if every single person in the story is righteously stoned out of their mind.

      Give it a go, and tell me I'm wrong.
    • 5/5
      What a masterpiece

      What a masterpiece

      What a masterpiece

      What a masterpiece

      What a masterpiece
    • 3/5
      Klassiek toneelstuk over de absurditeit van het leven, de schraalheid van het bestaan, de onmenselijkheid van de mens, de onmogelijkheid van communicatie, enz. De eerste lectuur heeft een groot schokeffect; tweede lectuur 20 jaar later stelt wat teleur.Een eerste keer in het Engels gelezen, op 17 jaar; vond het geweldig!