A Cockpit Production
Waiting For Godot
1 - 29 October 2014
A major new production of Beckett's searingly intelligent play about the inevitability of suffering, the collapse of abstract ideas in the face of it and the human capacity to deal with it anyway. Using the notes and sketches Beckett wrote in German, this production draws on scholarship, insight and theatrical talent from those that knew the man himself. The most important European play of the 20th century presented by a company that knows the work inside out. Deeply funny, deeply moving and completely uncompromising.
John Calder, Becket's first UK publisher, James Knowlson of the Beckett archive, University of Reading and Edward Beckett of the Samuel Beckett Estate are among those whose long term commitment and input to the work of The Godot Company at The Cockpit have made this production possible. All of them are lifelong Beckett scholars and all knew him personally.
Waiting For Godot draws on influences from The Bible to Dante, from Baudelaire to The Greeks and from Beckett's childhood in Ireland to his experiences in the French Resistance in rural France during the Second World War. For over 20 years The Godot Company collective of actors, artists and scholars have investigated, researched and performed the work of Beckett at venues large and small across France , Ireland and the UK; (The Cockpit has been running its Mapping Beckett salon series, examining Beckett’s sources, for two years now).
This production of Beckett's breakthrough play marks the high point of the Cockpit/Godot company collaboration, and seeks to present the play uncompromisingly as the classic it is: the most influential European play of the 20th century written by its pre-eminent literary intelligence at the end of one of the most terrible periods in human history. A timely look at a play of distinctly European ideas and sensibility - at a time when the nature and ideological balance of a united Europe is once more being revisited.
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