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Educational Philosophy and Theory

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A Desperate Comedy: Hope and

alienation in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot
a
Alan Scott
a
School of Educational Studies and Human Development,
University of Canterbury
Published online: 28 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Alan Scott (2013): A Desperate Comedy: Hope and alienation in Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45:4, 448-460

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Vol. 45, No. 4, 448–460, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2012.718149

A Desperate Comedy: Hope and

alienation in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot
ALAN SCOTT
School of Educational Studies and Human Development, University of Canterbury
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Abstract
This article is both a personal response to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and an
examination of the concept within literature of making the strange familiar and making the
familiar strange. It discusses the educative force and potential of Beckett’s strangers in a
strange world by examining my own personal experiences with the play. At the same time the
limitations of Beckett’s theatre are explored through the contrast with the work of Berthold
Brecht, who sought to make the familiar strange as a method of political enquiry to facilitate
the transformation of the capitalist state. Parallels are drawn between the possibilities of both
theatre and education as tools for social transformation and change.

Keywords: Theatre of the Absurd, social transformation, Waiting for Godot,

Bertolt Brecht

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1956) is unquestionably regarded as one of the
great, classic plays of that strange brand of theatre known as the Theatre of
the Absurd. For many of us, though, it is a play like no other, which transcends the
boundaries of its genre. Its unique combination of bleak and haunting desperation,
surreal encounter and impish, wayward humour in the face of a pointless universe
confirms its place as one of the masterpieces of twentieth century theatre, indeed, per-
haps of theatre of any era. In 1999, Waiting for Godot was voted the most significant
English language play of the twentieth century in a British Royal National Theatre
poll of 800 playwrights, actors, directors and journalists.
This is no mean feat for a play which seems almost as strange now as it must have
seemed nearly 60 years ago, when it was first produced in Paris, in the Theatre Baby-
lone in 1953. Here was a play with an accessible comedy but with an impenetrable
meaning, a play about two odd and hapless tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who seem
to wile away the time by engaging in pointless conversation. They are strangers to us,

Ó 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

 A Desperate Comedy 449

eccentric oddballs with idiosyncratic habits, people whose paths we are unlikely to
cross. If their strangeness alarms or excites us, it pales when the two hobos are
accosted by two even stranger characters, Pozzo and Lucky, the one barking like a cir-
cus ringmaster, the other seemingly mute and captured by a rope around his neck
which is held by his master.
In Waiting for Godot, we have a play without a beginning or an end, though it is
true that the lights come up and, two and a half hours later, go down. Here is a play
without a plot in the conventional sense of the term, with two tramps on a country
road that could be anywhere, waiting for someone who the audience, from the start,
has a fairly good idea will never show up. The someone is called Godot, which people
often take to mean God, but there is to be no denouement in this drama. He is more
likely to be the god that failed, to steal Richard Crossman’s term, than the god of
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ages. There is definitely no deus ex machina in this play, who will resolve the plot or
rescue the characters and certainly not solve the metaphysical conundrum which has
been posed. After all is said and done, Waiting for Godot is a two-act play in which
nothing happens twice, as Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier so famously said (Mer-
cier, 1956, p. 6).
Indeed, Waiting for Godot is a play of contradictions: the master who ends up fet-
tered to the slave, the tramps who play Jesus one minute and the fool the next, who
wait patiently for the unattainable, yet struggle violently to pull off their boots; who
want to hang themselves in order to pass the time. It is funny to watch yet a night-
mare to think about.
There are stranger plays to be sure, weirder and denser than Beckett’s outlandish
piece, but none of them quite packs the clout that his does. None of them leaves
you with the same heightened contradiction of joyous satisfaction and growing frus-
tration. You know you have enjoyed something important; you are just not sure
what it is.
This article is not merely intended as a piece of literary or academic criticism or a
philosophical discursion on strangeness and the stranger in literature; it is also a per-
sonal response to a play which has delighted, confounded and haunted me for most
of my life. It is a play which disappoints me in a profound sense, but one which has
educated me more than any other, a play which makes me throw my hands up in des-
pair, but is the very one I will put in my coffin, like an Egyptian pharaoh, to keep me
going in the afterlife.
It is play I have seen four times, on two of which occasions I reviewed it as a the-
atre critic. To review it is a daunting task, for Waiting for Godot is a play whose repu-
tation enters the stage long before the actors do. What interests me as a theatre
reviewer, though, is how a play whose intent or message seems so elusive can seem to
strike such a chord with its audience. Martin Esslin, in his seminal work The Theatre
of the Absurd (1968), recounts how a staging of the play in San Quentin prison in
1957 drew an immediate response from the convicts, who were enthralled by it and
who identified with the characters’ predicament. They understood what waiting was
at a deeper level than any of us could comprehend. Indeed, Esslin’s account is now
part of the folklore of the play, often repeated as a marker of the drama’s remarkable
ability to captivate. Forty years later, a New Zealand staging of the play by the
 450 Alan Scott

National Theatre from the UK had audiences in stitches, a feat it had repeated night
after night in London for months on end. Waiting for Godot is a play, clearly, which
crosses time and country barriers.
Yet its theatrical immediacy and accessibility are, in a sense, at odds with both its
elusive, pessimistic metaphysics and its strange dramatic style and structure. It is plot-
less, without narrative movement and without characters we can recognize or identify
with. There is no clear sense of where it is going or what it intends to convey. Vladi-
mir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky are strangers to the audience. To be sure, two of
them are tramps but their frequently bizarre ramblings, repetitions and arguments
move them well past any quaint Chaplinesque stereotypes we might be familiar with.
Pozzo and Lucky seem almost from another planet, so distant from us are their antics
and weird relationship. There is nothing conventional within these characters to give
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us a clue as to what the play is supposed to be about.

No wonder then that Brook Atkinson, in his 1956 review for the New York Times,
said: ‘Don’t expect this column to explain Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,”
which was acted at the John Golden last evening. It is a mystery wrapped in an
enigma’ (Atkinson, 1956).
Yet, he was immediately aware of the mystery’s haunting force: ‘But you can expect
witness to the strange power this drama has to convey the impression of some melan-
choly truths about the hopeless destiny of the human race’ (Atkinson, 1956).
These truths, though, are only faintly discernible, inchoate and entirely generalized:
The rest of the symbolism is more elusive. But it is not a pose. For Mr.
Beckett’s drama adumbrates——rather than expresses——an attitude toward
man’s experience on earth; the pathos, cruelty, comradeship, hope, corrup-
tion, filthiness and wonder of human existence. Faith in God has almost
vanished. But there is still an illusion of faith flickering around the edges of
the drama. (Atkinson, 1956)
Atkinson gives the clue to the play’s strange power in his summation, which encapsu-
lates the nature of its bold theatrical tour de force:
Although ‘Waiting for Godot’ is a ‘puzzlement’, as the King of Siam would
express it, Mr. Beckett is no charlatan. He has strong feelings about the
degradation of mankind, and he has given vent to them copiously. ‘Waiting
for Godot’ is all feeling. Perhaps that is why it is puzzling and convincing at
the same time. (Atkinson, 1956)
It is the feelings that are central here, not just Beckett’s but those of the characters
themselves. They may be foreigners who talk in a language we hardly comprehend
but we can sense the intensity and variety of their emotional life. Their strange
humour makes us laugh, their resignation we admire and their desolate anguish brings
us to despair. Above all, we recognize ourselves in them and we dimly perceive that
in another time, another place, we might well be as them.
Beckett’s achievement in Waiting for Godot is to make the strange familiar. My own
review for the Christchurch Press in 2010 expressed it this way:
 A Desperate Comedy 451

The production was less somber, too, though no less harrowing. Its empha-
sis on the comedy of the piece, with Ian McKellen and Roger Rees seeming
as much vaudeville artists as down and out tramps, lifted the play for the
audience. It actually made you engage with them as characters, as fellow
human beings, while, at the same time, their desperate plight enabled you
to keep them at a distance.

This, for me was the great strength of the production. You could see the
world for what it was but you could see its inhabitants for people like us.
We absolutely all understood the predicament these two tramps were in.
(Scott, 2010)
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This, I think I dimly recognized when I first saw Samuel Beckett’s play as a seven-
teen-year-old schoolboy, studying A-levels in the seventh form, at what, in retrospect,
was a fairly dark point in my life.
For I was a stranger in a strange land myself, a working-class boy in a middle-class
grammar school. My burgeoning atheism, partly caused by the heartlessness of my
Christian teachers, had put me well and truly at odds with them. At the same time,
my awakening Marxism went down like a lead balloon in this Jesuit educational insti-
tution. It was to be my meagre, but valued, inheritance from my uneducated but
politically aware parents, and yet, to make matters worse, I was being taught by my
new culture to be alienated from my roots. I was truly one of Richard Hoggart’s
scholarship boys, caught between two worlds, never comfortable in the new, unable
to return to the old.
The play was brought to town by Century Theatre, in those days a travelling thea-
trical troupe, who set up their own temporary performance space. What I saw in their
astonishing production was that Vladimir and Estragon were as trapped as I was, but
they faced their sentence in the prison of life neither with a gritty stoicism which I
could admire, nor with an unrelenting despair with which I might empathize but
rather with a childish, playful humour, as if life was so bad it was funny. This
matched a certain cultural attitude I was familiar with: the North of England work-
ing-class tendency to deprecate and take the mickey out of everything, but most of all
oneself and one’s situation. I recognized in Waiting for Godot the same gallows
humour that was the trademark of proletarian endurance. But, while we waited for
Blake’s New Jerusalem, the Big Rock Candy Mountain of the socialist utopia, they
just waited for Godot, an unknown and unlikely visitor to a world that, anyway, made
no sense.
For me, struggling to adapt to a middle-class world, while keeping peace with my
own working-class culture, and rejecting god and the Catholic Church for what I saw
as their complicity with capitalism in the oppression of my own family and neighbour-
hood, required a certain mental toughness and a sense that the world could be differ-
ent. Against all the odds, I had to recognize that the ordered world of God, Queen
and Country was a chimera and that my teachers, who, irony of ironies, I needed to
provide me with the intellectual tools to rise above my station, were themselves disor-
dered fools, intelligent beings that actually knew nothing.
 452 Alan Scott

In that one visit to the theatre, I sensed that the two idiot tramps had got it right.
They knew what the world amounted to. The highlight of the play for me is at a point
in the second half when all four actors collapse in a heap on the floor. With Lucky
half-dead and prostrate, and Pozzo wriggling around helplessly, the two tramps try to
fall asleep on top of them. It is then we realize what Beckett surely intends us to real-
ize that with this jumbled heap of festering feet, fetid bodies and slobbering mouths,
thus passes the glory of the world.
For me, the magic of Beckett’s theatre, though he had constructed a seemingly
hopeless and pointless universe, brought a mental release through his making the
strange believable. While in the magic theatre of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, ‘the price of
admission was your mind’, the outcome of Beckett’s theatre, for me, was that the cost
of the ticket also bought sanity. I was not the only one at odds with the world.
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The point being made here needs to be clearly explicated. The effect of Waiting for
Godot is not to convert people, least of all me, to some form of ludic nihilism or to
some comedic but desperate existentialism. Rather, it is to state that an introduction
to strangers in a strange universe enables us to realize a certain truth about our own
existence, namely that we give meaning to the world; the world is always a representa-
tion. Our encounter with a stranger’s viewpoint compels us to assess our own. The
educative force of Beckett’s creative, imagined, torturous and nightmarish depiction
of the cosmos forces us to recognize that our own reality might too be a representa-
tion and not an objective truth, that our own reality is as fictitious as the play on the
stage, that we ourselves may well be strangers in a world of others’ devising.
While this might seem to prefigure postmodernist logic, this point has nothing to
do, it may be added, with postmodernism’s sense of interpretation from the position
of the subject, of the reading of history, rather than the uncovering of its certainty, of
the fragile, situated yet uncertain nature of our social world and knowledge. Not for
me at any rate. For, in time, I would come to understand from Marx that ‘the ruling
ideas of every age are ever the ideas of the ruling class’ (Marx, 1972, p. 57) and that
‘men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state’. Vladimir and Est-
ragon were waiting for Mr Godot, and if Godot was indeed god, then their anxiety to
see him was because, again to quote Marx, ‘religion is the impotence of the human
mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand’.1 It was only when I discovered
Marx’s concept of false consciousness that I truly understood what Beckett intended.
It is an irony to be smiled at, for Beckett is that least political of playwrights, and it is
his obsession with the human condition that blinds him to the real conditions of exis-
tence. The world of Waiting for Godot is as false as the world it sought to subvert,
but, with that clarity of youth, all those years ago, I saw, too, that the world of my
priests and teachers was a drama in which I was only playing a role. I had discovered
through an encounter with strangers in the Theatre of the Absurd what Shakespeare
had also found, that all the world was, indeed, a stage and we humans were merely
players.
For the practitioners of the Theatre of the Absurd what we humans are is not
known in any meaningful way; there is only what each individual writer can sense the
world to be and can express through poetic images. Collectively, though, the drama-
tists of the Absurd seem to convey a world view that is understandable even if it is
 A Desperate Comedy 453

not specifically articulated in a thematic sense. We may express this world view as the
perception that behind everything is nothing, that communication is impossible since
language is meaningless and that living is essentially just another form of dying.
If the meaning behind absurdist theatre is hard to pin down, Beckett, himself,
rarely gave it any clarity in his own commentary on his work. He was well known for
rejecting any attempts at an interpretation of his plays, in particular of Waiting for
Godot. He seems somewhat disingenuous in his introduction to an abridged version of
the play, which was read out at a performance in the studio of the Club d’Essai de la
Radio and was broadcast in 1952:
I don’t know who Godot is. I don’t even know (above all don’t know) if he
exists. And I don’t know if they believe in him or not——those two who are
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waiting for him. The other two who pass by towards the end of each of the
two acts, that must be to break up the monotony. All I knew I showed. It’s
not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin. I’ll even say that I
would have been satisfied with less. As for wanting to find in all that a
broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with
the program and the Eskimo pie, I cannot see the point of it. But it must
be possible … Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, their time and their space,
I was able to know them a little, but far from the need to understand.
Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me. They
and I are through with each other. (Cohn, 2006, p. 122)
This authorial suicide pre-dates Barthes by over a decade. Of course, we must be
mindful of Foucault’s or Barthes’ strictures about the difficulty of conceiving of a uni-
tary author with a unitary message, but, nonetheless, pointlessness and hopelessness
seem endemic facets of absurdism.
At the end of Waiting for Godot, which is the most definitive play in absurdist the-
atre, Pozzo captures this sense of futility which is a defining characteristic of the
genre:
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abomina-
ble! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went
dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born,
one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for
you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an
instant, then it’s night once more …. On!
Towards the end of the play Vladimir’s words pick up this expression of a sense-
lessness at the heart of the universe:
Astride of a grave and difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the
gravedigger puts on the forceps.
One cannot, in a sense, argue with that totality of position. Vladimir states it clearly
in the opening line of the play, ‘Nothing to be done’. We fall out of the womb and
into the grave and all we can do in that gleaming instant is laugh at the stupidity and
pointlessness of it all. And yet, it was enough for me, for if life was desperate it was at
 454 Alan Scott

least a desperate comedy. There was hope, too, in their gritty, if infirm, grip on a
fragile and disintegrating world. One could at least hold on; one could at least wait
for Godot, laughing to the end. As Normand Berlin suggested:
Beckett’s dark summation of the human condition, presented with compas-
sion and humor, includes man’s ability to keep his appointment, to go on,
despite the hopelessness of his condition. Man is obliged to go on, just as
Beckett felt obliged to continue writing even though there is ‘nothing to
express’, as he put it. (Berlin, 1999)
What these two clowns had was another take on life and what they exemplified was
another world view that was as equally believable and plausible as the one I was
drowning in. What I did not know was that this world view was not simply an alterna-
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tive to, or rejection of, the Judeo-Christian tradition and all that its heritage entailed. It
was itself the outcome of certain historical, social and cultural conditions, for I had yet
to discover social psychology and political economy. I had yet to discover alienation.
It is, of course, immediately apparent to anyone with a passing knowledge of Euro-
pean history that a specific set of social and historical conditions preceded the period
in which the absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett wrote their plays. Indeed, it is
reasonable to argue that the cataclysmic events of World War II gave rise to a certain
zeitgeist, in Continental Europe if not in the UK and the USA, which favoured the
development of a poetry of futility. The outcome of the Enlightenment project in its
industrial and scientific manifestation was the rapid rise in technological advancements
which generated a belief in progress, through both a philosophical and material com-
mitment to technological rationalism. This technological rationalism, however, had led
not to an air-conditioned utopia but to Auschwitz and Treblinka, and, in Churchill’s
words, to ‘all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule’. It was this rationalized mass produc-
tion of murder, rather than purely logical turns in Left Bank social theorizing, that
might be said to have profoundly affected philosophy, and in particular European
philosophy, in the post-war period. The existential universe of Waiting for Godot, along
with the ambiguous, uncertain, tentative world of postmodernism, is a direct emana-
tion of the material state.
This material state is distinguished by alienation. Alienation, as we are all well
aware, has many meanings, from an encapsulation of personal psychological or affec-
tive states to an all-encompassing descriptor of social relationships. That all the
strangers in Waiting for Godot are alienated, both from themselves and from the ‘nor-
mal’ world, is self-evident. What Beckett achieves is to link up these strangers with
the audience, so that if they are alienated from us as they go about their business on
the stage, given the stage is a world of its own and they cannot see us, we are no
longer alienated from them. We start to empathize and we start to make sense of their
crazy world. This happens because Beckett has made the strange familiar.
But alienation has another stricter meaning in twentieth century theatre, where it
was use by Bertolt Brecht to rewrite the purpose and function of theatre and to devise
a method of playing that was revolutionary. Brecht set about dismantling and recon-
structing the very form of theatre itself. Intent on educating his audience about the
real nature of capitalism and the necessity for social transformation, he was a
 A Desperate Comedy 455

playwright with a message, and a radical message needed a revolutionary mode of

delivery. As he said, ‘Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation
must also change’.
As a Marxist, Brecht, who is, perhaps, the most influential director and theatre the-
orist of the last 100 years, was conversant with Marx’s use of alienation to describe
the effects of the capitalist mode of production and of capitalist social relations. From
Brecht’s point of view, theatre, which he called a ‘bourgeois narcotics factory’, served
a similar function to religion in that it masked the real conditions of the world. For
Marxists, alienation is not so much a psychological state, though it unquestionably
has effects upon an individual’s psyche, rather it describes a social state of ignorance
about the real conditions of existence. Alienated from a customary life, human beings,
over the course of generations, come to see their new lives as normal, as the way the
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world just is. They develop a false consciousness, in other words. What is for them
familiar is for Marx and Brecht an artifice which results from alienation. What Brecht
sought to do with his new theatre was to alienate the audience from their own alien-
ation. He sought not to make the strange familiar but rather to make the familiar
strange. It is said that, at the time of his death, Brecht was working on a play as a
response to Waiting for Godot. From Brecht’s viewpoint, I am sure, it is not Pozzo’s
gleam of light that is important; rather, it is the trick of the light through which Beck-
ett mistook his own alienation for the real world.
Making the strange familiar, as Beckett does, or the familiar strange in the Brech-
tian manner is not a new departure for writers or a new concept in literature. T. S.
Eliot pointed out in his essay ‘Andrew Marvell’ how Marvell (1621–1678) did this
over 400 years ago:
And in the verses of Marvell which have been quoted there is the making
the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge attributed to
good poetry. (Elliot, 1950, p. 251)
This ‘making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar’ is a characteristic of
Romantic poetry and of the best poets. As Coleridge put it:
To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to com-
bine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which
every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … this is the charac-
ter and privilege of genius. (Coleridge, 1976, p. 476)
Indeed, Coleridge’s own skill was in making the strange believable, while he credited
Wordsworth with giving to the familiar an attribute of novelty.
… awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and direct-
ing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inex-
haustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity
and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and
hearts that neither feel nor understand. (Coleridge, 1976, p. 482)
Of course, Wordsworth’s making the familiar strange had no political purpose but
was rather the outcome of his pantheistic sensibilities. Strangeness in the sense of
 456 Alan Scott

freshness was really the attribute he wanted to ascribe to elements of the natural
world which, through familiarity, had become mundane. For Brecht, it was not so
much freshness as the need for a fresh look at things, a re-looking, if you like, that
drove his new theatre and his implacable urge to subvert the old. He wanted the new
theatre to explore and reveal the social and economic base of human life, as opposed
to the merely psychological dimension. From Brecht’s point of view traditional theatre
internalized in the characters of a play the conflicts built into a capitalist society. It
expressed as psychological states what were really social states. The problem was that
it took these psychological states at face value; it never once revealed them for what
they really were. Traditional theatre was dishonest both artistically and politically,
helping to shore up capitalist society by hiding the real nature of its social relations,
which Marxists saw as oppressive and exploitative.
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For Brecht, all theatre was ideological, and he would have agreed with George
Orwell that ‘all art is propaganda’ In the way that Marx had argued that philosophy
had only sought to interpret the world rather than change it, so, for Brecht, art too
frequently reflected back the world to its observers and stayed silent. With some force,
he argued that ‘art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to
shape it’. What needed shaping was the material reality of capitalism; what required
changing was the conditions under which people lived and worked. If Beckett was
exploring the human condition, then from Brecht’s point of view he was exhibiting
false consciousness; he was mistaking the outcome for the cause. It was conditions
and not condition that was the issue. As we saw, Beckett had said of Vladimir and
Estragon: ‘Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me’. Such
neutrality was for Brecht the staple of bourgeois theatre, but neutrality for Brecht was
not a neutral position; it was a reactionary one. This neutrality of the theatre was
ideological and this ideology was hidden between the lines of the text, built into the
fabric of the theatre itself, into the way plays were presented, and into the whole pro-
cess of production. Hence the need for a revolutionary theatre with an avante-garde
practice that could, in some measure, shape the world.
Brecht’s view of theatre prefigures an educational debate that has been dominant
since the late 1970s and which relates to the role and function of schooling. It is a
debate which has questioned both the desirability of neutrality in teaching itself and
the supposed political neutrality of the education system as a whole. The question
that Bertolt Brecht raised for theatre practitioners in the 1930s is similar to one that
educationalist and social commentators raise now. Faced with fascism and the depres-
sion, and the immense social rift they occasioned, he questioned the neutrality of
actors, the view of actors as essentially vehicles to convey a writer’s thoughts. He
asked of actors: on whose behalf do you act? For whom and for what purpose do you
perform?
In similar vein, an understanding and articulation of this question has been a focus
of research into teachers’ work. Do teachers educate students because education is a
human right and a public good, a desirable outcome irrespective of the ends to which
it is put? Do they educate because, as servants of the state, they are required to social-
ize future citizens and prepare them for the differing occupations required in a mod-
ern society? Or are they to teach for social justice in order to assure fairness and to
 A Desperate Comedy 457

ameliorate the excesses of stratified social systems? On whose behalf do you teach,
Brecht would have asked, and on whose behalf are you to teach?
For Brecht, as we saw, his new theatre was to be revolutionary. Despite its best pre-
tences of value-free performance, bourgeois theatre as an institution was not merely
neutral but reactionary. This was not merely in terms of the content it performed but
in terms of the overall structuring of theatre. As Marshall McLuhan expressed it years
later, ‘the medium is the message’.
In relation to education, this position echoes two contemporary concerns. First,
what Brecht pointed us towards, to use our own educational lingo, was the ‘hidden
curriculum’, in his case of theatre. In the stratified societies of our Western liberal
democracies, the reproduction, transgenerationally, of structural inequality is accom-
plished in part by schooling. Within schooling, the hidden curriculum has been seen
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as a potent mechanism by which the dominant culture maintains its hegemony and
establishes the hierarchical relationships essential for the preservation of capitalist
social and economic relations. The ostensible neutrality of schooling in relation to the
support of the established economic order is held to be mere appearance. Indeed,
through the hidden curriculum, the medium of schooling becomes a vital message
imparting the true nature of social and economic reality.
For Brecht, concerned to transform this very divisive and exploitative social and
economic reality, the theatre had to take sides. This, again, echoes a contemporary
educational concern, for what Brecht essentially proposed to offset the neutrality of
theatre was a critical pedagogy of the stage, in the same way that critical theorists
of education have sought to exploit a critical pedagogy of the classroom. The heart of
Brecht’s method was alienation, sometimes referred to as the V-effect, after the Ger-
man word ‘verfremdungseffekt’, which may be translated as the estrangement effect. Its
aim was to break the illusion of reality on stage which forced both actors and audi-
ence to identify totally with the characters.
Such identification meant loss of truth, for characters could not be observed objec-
tively. Rather, to use Brecht’s words, ‘the audience stare at the stage as if spellbound,
which is an expression from the Middle Ages, an age of witches and obscurantists’
(Esslin, 1984, p. 114). The audience lost its critical faculties as it became immersed
in the emotions of the play.
Alienation involved a series of effects. The plays were written as chronicles, inter-
spersed with songs and narration. Masks were used, the lighting was harsher, and sets
were constructed to look like sets, with tools and cans of paint left lying around. Plac-
ards were used to telegraph the action. Most importantly, the acting was lean and the
old manner of declaiming the part was banished. The more modern manner of play-
ing the character with a psychological intensity and truth after the method of Stani-
slavsky was also displaced. Brecht’s ‘gestus’ method, which enabled actors to reveal
the social and economic dimensions of the characters, became the modus operandi of
his theatre, the critical pedagogy of his dramatic art.
For Brecht, art was not a compulsion born out of the artist’s own personality and
needs which allowed them to represent the world through a creative symbolization.
Strangers and strange ways only further mystified the objective conditions of exis-
tence. Art, for Brecht, was a directive from history to show the world that the way it
 458 Alan Scott

lived was the metaphor. The familiar needed to be estranged, for without estrange-
ment there could be no alternative. As Marx would have appreciated, until Brecht
theatre had only sought to represent the world. The point was to change it.
It is at this moment that I part company with Beckett; it is at this moment I find
myself profoundly disappointed by his writings. For it is here that the twentieth cen-
tury debate about the function, purpose and nature of theatre becomes critical. This
debate, which is really a variation on the old structure/agency debate, questions
whether theatre can have a transformative purpose, or whether it is always simply a
reflection of the historical, social, political and economic circumstances in which it
finds itself.
It seems to me that Beckett’s work implies that he is not interested in the question
and that, perhaps like Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco, who after Beckett is the
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best known representative of European absurdist theatre, he eschews any inclination

to change the world. In response to criticisms of his work in 1958 by Kenneth Tynan,
the Observer’s drama critic, Ionesco was forthrightly defensive:
… I do not like messiahs and I certainly do not consider the vocation of the
artist or the playwright to lie in that direction. I have a distinct impression
that it is Mr. Tynan who is in search of messiahs. But to deliver a message
to the world, to wish to direct its course, to save it, is the business of the
founders of religions, of the moralists or the politicians … A playwright sim-
ply writes plays, in which he can offer only a testimony, not a didactic mes-
sage … any work of art which was ideological and nothing else would be
pointless … inferior to the doctrine it claimed to illustrate, which would
already have been expressed in its proper language, that of discursive dem-
onstration. An ideological play can be no more than the vulgarization of an
ideology. (Esslin, 1968, p. 126)
Tynan had described Ionesco as ‘a self proclaimed advocate of anti-theatre: explicitly
anti-realist and by implication anti-reality as well’. For Tynan, Ionesco ‘was a writer
ready to declare that words were meaningless and all communication between human
beings was impossible’ (Esslin, 1968, p. 127). Tynan characterized Ionesco’s theatre
as ‘that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief
in man will forever be banished’.
In similar vein, faith in logic and belief in man became components of an important
educational debate. The second half of the twentieth century saw a key discussion
over the possibilities of education as a transformative force for social change and
whether the nature and purpose of education were inextricably tied in with the nature
and purpose of the capitalist economies. The end, around 1970, of the period of
immense growth in Western economies since 1945, known as the Long Boom, along
with its concomitant recession, coincided with, or possibly occasioned, an abrupt shift
in our understanding of the politics of teachers’ work. The post-World War II period
had been distinguished in education by an adherence to the idea of ‘equality of oppor-
tunity’, a moral and social principle that underpinned Western education systems.
While, in the midst of recession, teachers and government officials soldiered on with
liberal reformism, neo-Marxists in universities began to probe its hollow centre. They
 A Desperate Comedy 459

argued that teachers’ work was related not to the furtherance of the equality of oppor-
tunity principle, a central post-war tenet, but to the continuance of the class system.
Teachers, however unwittingly, were maintaining social stratification and not improv-
ing social mobility.
The most famous formulation of this view was, of course, Bowles and Gintis’ corre-
spondence principle. Criticized for its unitary and reductionist approach, it was even-
tually moderated by the relative autonomy thesis. This thesis, along with resistance
theory, attempted to temper the seeming determinism of the neo-Marxist approach
which was seen to have too easily favoured structure over agency. The material terrain
neo-Marxism honed in on was, of course, capitalism, but instead of the educational
welfarism that liberal reformism discovered there, it found in its place a well-disguised
and hidden exploitation. Not surprisingly, the explication of false consciousness
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became a large feature of the discursive terrain and it is precisely false consciousness,
it seems to me, which distinguishes both Ionesco’s and Beckett’s work.
There is no direct equivalency, of course, with the argument between Tynan and
Ionesco and the debate between educational liberals and neo-Marxists. What is being
suggested is that there are connections between the debate over the role of theatre, its
nature and purpose, and the function, purpose and nature of education. There is a
number of institutions or mechanisms, we might say, in any social system which
ensure its survival and reproduction.
It can be argued that, like Ionesco’s theatre, Beckett’s is ‘anti-realist and by impli-
cation anti-reality as well’. It seems to me that Waiting for Godot displays no belief in
man. There is no faith in logic, no Godot, and no Hegelian telos at the end of Beck-
ett’s black and white rainbow. There is testimony, in Ionesco’s sense, but it is the tes-
timony of strangers, who having spilled the beans on life in our part of the world,
depart back to their strange land, as helpless to change ours as when they first came.
The poet A. Alvarez argues that the nihilism of the Nazi extermination camps only
found artistic expression in Beckett’s plays, like Endgame or Waiting for Godot, in
which, as he so eloquently phrased it:
the naked unaccommodated man is reduced to the role of the helpless,
hopeless, impotent comic, who talks and talks and talks in order to post-
pone for a while the silence of his own desolation. (Graver & Federman,
1978, p. 120)
For me, watching the neoliberal juggernaut driving over the lives of millions of
people in both the developed and the developing countries, it is the nihilism of
capitalist social relations that needs artistic expression and it is Beckett who is the
impotent comic retreating to the silence of his own desolation. And yet Beckett’s
strange world, with its four stranger characters, taught me so much, as I interpreted
its elusive meaning on that day of emancipation in my almost misspent youth. I think
I know what the play means and I have tried to spell out in this article its implications
for understanding the role of strangers and strangeness in theatrical expression. I may
be wrong, but no matter. As Beckett himself said of Waiting for Godot: ‘If I knew
[what it meant], I would have said so in the play’.
 460 Alan Scott

Note
1. This quotation is often attributed to Marx but I am unable to find the exact reference.

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