Chapter 20 - Lucky

Summary

I’ve never been to prison, but I spent five years in a boys’ boarding school. That's why I understood immediately and at a visceral level the most famous story concerning Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a story retold by Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd (a book, by the by, that named the Absurd as an enduring dramatic genre, to the enduring dismay of most play-wrights so labeled).

The story, in case you have never heard it, tells of a landmark production of Godot at the maximum security prison at San Quentin in 1957, directed by Herbert Blau. As Esslin reports it, the recondite drama that had puzzled sophisticates in the theatre centers of the world “was immediately grasped” by the inmates who saw in it a reflection of their petrified existence and who followed the play with mesmerized attention. It is easy to want to treat this miraculous conversion narrative skeptically, especially after having spent a career teaching the play to wary students. As with the college crowd, surely the hard-bitten convicts included a handful who scoffed at Beckett's precious allegory. Nonetheless, it appears many were truly spellbound by the play, a remarkable feat for any drama under much less adverse circumstances, and that it was especially the figure of Lucky, the bound menial of Pozzo whose great discharge of thinking climaxes the first act, who drew their most intense sympathy. Of him more later.

Like the prisoners, we sequestered pupils had tasted the absurd. We had peered into the abyss of absurdity. To us schoolboys, marooned in a brick fortress on a windswept hilltop in provincial Germany, gazing uncomprehendingly at the distant world through the bars of Latin grammar and differential equations, overeducated and overripe with puberty's desires, the repetitive, loquacious immobility of Beckett's figures was our immobility, just as their awkward, testy love for each other was our love, too. From there on, Godot has always been a work that kept on answering questions I didn't know I’d asked, or perhaps posing questions I didn't know were askable.