Turning Text Into Performance By Mark Thomson 's Waiting For Godot

Michael Gow’s Away is a stage play about three socioeconomically varied families and their different holiday experiences. Throughout the play, Gow alludes to many of Shakespeare’s texts to deepen the audiences’ understanding of the performance. Distinct connections are shown between Gow’s Away and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and King Lear. These references feature through direct use of lines, characters, theatrical conventions and themes. This essay will explore each of these methods of allusion and explain how this use of intertextuality heightens audience comprehension.

Theatre is a complex art that attempts to weave stories of varying degrees of intricacies with the hope that feelings will be elicited from the audience. Samuel Beckett’s most famous work in the theatre world, however, is Waiting for Godot, the play in which, according to well-known Irish critic Vivian Mercier, “nothing happens, twice.” Beckett pioneered many different levels of groundbreaking and avant-garde theatre and had a large influence on the section of the modern idea of presentational theatre as opposed to the representational. His career seemingly marks the end of modernism in theatre and the creation of what is known as the “Theatre of the Absurd.”

There are two obvious (perhaps there can be more) understandings of the authority of text: historical and more philosophical. What historians question sometimes in old texts is their ownership, because the information about an author is either lost or not proven, hence they do not know who textual authority belongs to. This problem rarely happens with modern texts, as the author is known, however, they, as all other texts, face up the problem of adaptation without losing its authenticity. Specifically, it concerns drama text and performance relationship, but nowadays, with the rise of cinema, it is also related to epic texts. How much authority does a playwright have over his text? Can a director modify a text without crossing playwright’s authority? To what extent authority of drama belongs to a playwright? This essay will focus on this understanding of textual authority, trying to answer these questions and other

“the main purpose of Verbatim theatre has always been to challenge audiences into a confrontation with real events and concrete facts, an to prevent their escapism into theatrical fantasy.”

Anton Checkov’s The Proposal, is a perfect example of the use of literary devices in an effort to create dramatic conflict. The well-meaning characters create massive tension with one another over a simple and avoidable misunderstanding. Checkov’s plot and dialogue turn what should have been a joyous occasion into a full-fledged argument about the land rights of two neighboring families. Additionally, Checkov uses stage direction to bring out the anger and frustration of the three characters. Checkov’s one-act play exemplifies the interaction of different literary devices when creating dramatic tension in a play.

Henrik Isben, author of the short play, An Enemy of the People gives readers an interesting storyline to follow. The acts of the play revolve around two strong-headed brothers with completely different political view backgrounds arguing against one another for the sake of the town. However to start off his play Isben’s opens readers into the actual set up of the play by giving textual information of the stage set up. By doing this alone readers can get a sense of the atmosphere of the play, and acknowledge some characters before they even begin to talk, which then sparks more of an interest in the play, and can lead readers to begin mental functioning of the play.

The following work will call your attention to the way in which a playwright and a novelist deploy key stylistic and dramatic effects and will be complete by means of examining a passage taken from each work. To follow a comparison and contrast of the techniques used within the two works will be observed.

The adjective ‘effective’ means to produce a deep or vivid impression, but also something adequate enough to determine a purpose within intended or expected outcome. So what makes effective drama, is it something with a clear meaning and storyline, or could it be something with a beginning middle and end. Effective drama does not have any set of rules, however it is something that the audience can either understand or relate to. Which is something Caryl Churchill does within her play Love and Information. She creates effective drama although it is not directly because of narrative, for it is argued that she does not have any clear narrative within this play. However there are specific things included in Love and Information as well as external research that disagree with this remark. Narrative is most commonly knowns as ‘story’ or ‘plot’, and has been considered to of existed since the stone age, in regards to ‘cave paintings…expected narratives to be woven around their images’. The question is stated does effective drama ‘need’ narrative, it is important to view this as, does narrative cause the drama or play to become better or does it simply assist the context and themes. Although it does not necessarily need narrative there is almost always some aspect of narrative included, which is true for Churchill’s play. Meanwhile this essay will explore all of the key attributes that make up a narrative, and how these narratives or lack of

In “Visible Words: The York Plays, Brecht, and Gestic Writing,” Garrett P.J. Epp defines this writing as “any attempt by a playwright to direct or control the action onstage through dialogue” 290). With the language of the text itself being imbued with movement, the conceptualized divine becomes presented in a physically tangible and comprehensible

In Waiting for Godot, a simplistic view can be applied which makes the play frustrating and seemingly worthless, which exemplifies how different views can be applied to different pieces of literature. If an existentialist view is applied to the play, it is easy to see how the nothingness that fills the main characters’ lives can be connected to the readers’ own lives and how the play exposes the lack of meaning thrust upon them. In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the suppression of the narrative arc and stagnant character development attribute to the simplicity and overall meaningless qualities present in everyday life.

Waiting for Godot is the most influential work of the XX century. Although Samuel Beckett, its author, did not want it to be interpreted, readers started to interpret it and nowadays the interpretations are endless. In this brief essay I focus my attention on two topics: the role of stage directions in the play and in some aspects of the characterization of the few people that intervene in it.

For example, there is belief in fate and destiny. It also represents real day to day actions o human beings making it a realistic play. Description of life in Thebes and their system of administration is highlighted in the play. Becket’s play, waiting for Godot is a direct opposite of what the Greek tragedy presents. Instead of order, his view of the world is full of chaos. The characters do not derive any meaning out of life. There are several attempts to commit suicide since Vladimir and Estragon lack the essence of living. The actions of man become senseless, useless and absurd (Batty et al, 38). Structure in the two plays has a great variation. As a representative of a traditional play, Oedipus the king takes a linear plot. It has an introduction that is the beginning, middle and finally the end. The normal sequencing of events namely; exposition, rising action leading to climax then falling action and finally resolution naming is observed. The first scene introduces us to the plague that the people of Thebes are suffering from including the Kings children. We are then enlightened of the causes of the plague and how the King tried to avert the curse. Fate leads him to his curse and finally his demise (Bloom, 19). Samuel Becket’s play, waiting for Godot however takes a different course. The action takes place in circles

RD-M-1.0.12 Identify characteristics of short stories, novels, poetry, and plays RD-H 1.0.9 Analyze critically a variety of genre VOCABULARY: monologue, concept map RESOURCES AND MATERIALS: • Text from 4-5 monologues (novel passages, TV, radio or movie scripts, student models, dramatic excerpts) • copies of concept map for students • Overhead definition of “monologue;” student copies optional • Web sites and sources for monologues: www.whysanity.net/monos (blocked by JCPS, but assessable elsewhere) screenwriting.about.com/cs/availablescripts Winning Monologues for Young Actors (Peg Kehret, Meriwether Publishing, Ltd.) Burning Up the Stage (Vin Morreale,

Waiting for Godot starts with introducing the setting as minimal, which is done to highlight the existentialist nature in the world where the humans are left alone to create a purpose to their lives. Traditional plays, like Hamlet, does not contain any stage directions about the props and leave it upon the director to assign what props the actors are to have on stage. The stage directions in the beginning of Waiting for Godot are ‘A country road. A tree. Evening.’ (1), which limits the director to have a very bare stage. The bare stage leaves the actors’ actions, or inactions, in focus. In Martin Esslin’s essay ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’, he coins the genre Theatre of the Absurd by referring to three plays which all challenged the traditional theatrical conventions. A definition of the genre is that it is absurd, ‘that which has no purpose’ (4) and therefore describes our existential lives. He attempts to explore this genre where he

Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play written by Samuel Beckett. The play seems to refuse any attempt to impose meaning systematically. The author would have us believe that time is meaningless, that repetition rules all, that inertia is manifest and human life is pointless. This idea that human life lacks meaning and purpose and that humans live in an indifferent universe is often associated with Existentialist writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre who, unlike Beckett, brought to life their dark ideas in traditional linear novels and plays with round rather than flat characters. Critics argue that Beckett’s non-traditional play, a classic example of what has come to be known as the Theatre of the Absurd, more fully clarifies the era’s bleak existentialist vision. It is a vision of irrationality- sheer waiting without end or outcome; yet these experiences of shapelessness and purposelessness are given powerful and distinctive shape by distinctive dramatic structure and elaborate repetitions.