Waiting for Godot Feelings ran high and the opposition, led by Sir Malcolm Sargent, threatened to resign if "Godot" won [The Best New Play category]. An English compromise was worked out by changing the title of the award. "Godot" became The Most Controversial Play of the Year. It is a prize that has never been given since." In the Australian premiere at the Arrow Theatre in Melbourne in 1957, Barry Humphries played Estragon opposite Peter O'Shaughnessy's Vladimir. Although not his favourite amongst his plays, "Waiting for Godot" was the work which brought Beckett fame and financial stability and as such it always held
Samuel Beckett have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence has been published in English. Beckett's prose pieces during the late period were not so prolific as his theatre, as suggested by the title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts "Fizzles" (which the American artist Jasper Johns illustrated). Beckett experienced something of a renaissance with the novella "Company" (1980), which continued with "Ill Seen Ill Said" (1982) and "Worstward Ho" (1984), later collected in "Nohow On". In these three "'closed space' stories," Beckett continued his preoccupation with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, as