SAMUEL BECKETT

Samuel Beckett was a major figure in modern European drama, the man who made everyone reconsider the nature of contemporary theatre with a single play about two tramps waiting for somebody they do not know in the middle of nowhere.

His most famous play is

Waiting for Godot.

Action: There is NO STORY IN THE TRADITIONAL SENSE of a development of events from a beginning to an end. Nothing ever really happens. Chronological time is meaningless.

Language: The language is informal. The dialogue is not coherently constructed.

Even the sentences spoken by the same character are often completely disconnected one from another. Rather, the language is used in such a way as to undermine its communicative function.

With Waiting for Godot (1950), Beckett became one of the main representatives of the 20th century called The Theatre of the Absurd. Waiting for Godot exerted a powerful grip on the imagination of the audience. It gave voice to the unexpressed anguish of all those who had lived through the tragedy of War World II and the ominous dropping of atomic bombs in Japan in 1945.