Lecture on Beckett & the Theatre of the Absurd by PRIVACY PhD Fellow Anni Haahr Henriksen

Anni Haahr Henriksen is currently working on Silence and Political Ideas in Elizabethan England, but she is also interested in later examples. She will give a lecture with the title: Beckett & the Theatre of the Absurd. 

En Attendant Godot, written by Samuel Beckett in 1948, was first staged in Paris in 1953. To the great advantage of the actors at Théâtre de Babylone, the reviewers were both delighted and appalled and the play became an instant pièce de scandale.

In London, however, the play was less well received. ‘Mass exodus’, ‘waves of hostility’ and heavy censure met Beckett’s play in the English capital. And yet, about forty years later, the piece was voted ‘most influential play of the 20th century’.

Why did Beckett’s play provoke such uproar? What made it stand out and what ensured its legacy?

This lecture addresses these questions by discussing the social and political context in which Waiting for Godot was written and performed. This contextual knowledge provides a means of understanding not only the audiences’ reactions but also Beckett’s dramatic style of negations, absence and silence, as constituent of the Theatre of the Absurd.