Waiting for Godot Waiting for Godot Waiting for Godot ( ) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), wait for the arrival of someone named Godot who never arrives, and while waiting they engage in a variety of discussions and encounter three other characters. "Waiting for Godot" is Beckett's translation of his own original French play, , and is subtitled (in English only) "a tragicomedy in two acts". The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. The premiere was on 5 January 1953 in the , Paris. The English
Krapp's Last Tape first draft. The first appearance of a title was "a manuscript edition to Typescript 2: "Crapp’s Last Tape""; the more familiar Germanic spelling came later. The name Krapp with its excremental connotations had been used before by Beckett however. In his first play, "Eleutheria", dating back to 1947, the protagonist is Victor Krap, a young man who has decided to retreat from life and do nothing. He has been described as a world-weary anti-hero, a failed writer and seedy solipsist, a clear prototype for the later Krapp. When the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp is talking about his neighbour's ritual singing in the