Peter Hall’s Waiting For Godot (1955)

Hey all, 

Since I wasn't in class last week, I'm providing an outline of what my presentation would have been. 

Music by Bartok: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmkDMTU-hb4 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvdJSVmi404

Pictures of the 1955 production: 

Picture 1 Picture 2

First production in English. Imported from France, directed by Peter Hall at 24. Before Godot, English theater was dominated by drawing-room comedies. The theater’s purpose was to be morally and artistically uplifting to the masses. Scripts were censored by the Lord Chamberlain, except for shows put on by privately owned clubs. London had very little room for small avant-garde theaters due to this censorship.

Peter Hall was the new, young director of the Arts Theatre, with 347 seats and a cramped stage. He cast mostly young, unknown actors. To compensate for the sparse language, Hall provided atmosphere and context with the set, which focused on providing realism. The set included a raised bank with scraggy vegetation upstage, a substantial tree on the bank upstage right that looked like a gnarled oak. Stage left there was “a tar barrel, a rock and some pieces of stone, as if abandoned by road-menders” (Bradby 75). The tar barrel was a focal point for a lot of the action. The set was extensive enough that some critics misinterpreted it as Expressionist. The costumes were elaborate and theatrical. Estragon and Vladimiir wore pinstripe suits that had once been nice, Pozzo wore a checkered suit with a check waistcoat in different check, check overcoat, cravat, monocle and watch chain – a member of the aristocracy. Pozzo, Estragon and Vladimir wore bowler hats. Lucky wore a stovepipe hat and was dressed as a porter. Estragon and Vladimir were portrayed as tramps.

The play was seen as degrading, squalid, pretentious drivel. Critics worried about understanding the play. The audiences and actors were embarrassed by the long unnatural pauses. It nearly closed until Kenneth Tynan, a critic for The Observer, wrote that Godot “forced me to re-examine the rules which had hitherto governed the drama; and having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough.”

The play’s religious implications were pointed up more in this production, for example, when the Boy is asked where Godot is, he points at the heavens.

Hall added background music by Bartok before the play began and at points in the show to “heighten the sense of strangeness and the feeling of dusk falling on an isolated country road” (75).

Bradby, David. Beckett: Waiting for Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.