The Chain and the Circle: A Structural Comparison of Waiting for Godot and Endgame

THE CHAIN AND THE CIRCLE A STRUCTURAL COMPARISON OF IFAIrING FOR GODar AND ENDGAME BECKETT'S FIRST TWO PLAyS REPRESENT two different principles of construction , on which his dramatic oeuvre is based. On the one hand are his one-act plays, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Come and Go as well as the radio plays All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music and Cascando; the TV play Eh Joe, Film and the pantomime Act without Words I. On the other hand, there are the two-act plays, Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Play, and also the pantomime in two parts Act without Words II. None of Beckett's published plays comprises more than two acts. Waiting for Godot is his longest and his only full-length play. His theater writing grows continuously shorter: the performance of his last theater play Come and Go hardly takes five minutes. There is little relation between the number of acts of a play and the duration of its performance. Endgame in one act is longer than the two plays in two acts, Happy Days and Play. The one-act play is the favorite form of the theater in crisis, of the anti-theater. Only at the turn of this century has the one-act play developed into a theater-form of its own. Strindberg, Zola, Maeterlinck , Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Wedekind, O'Neill, Yeats and Sartre (in Huis-Clos), and in the 'fifties Adamov, Ionesco, Tardieu and Beckett made use of the one-act form. As is usual for one-act plays, Endgame keeps a strict unity of time: the playing time equals the time of the play. The unity of place, too, is maintained, for Clov's entrances and exits divide the play into some 35 or 40 short scenes. And this succession of short scenes gives the impression of increasing tempo. On the other hand, coherence is obtained by the fact that Hamm remains present on the stage during all of the performance; so too, in Waiting for Godot one of the two main characters is continually present. In two of Beckett's two-act plays, the parts are of exactly equal length: in Play the parts are identical, in Act without Words II the daily activities of A must last just as long as those of B. In the other plays the second act is shorter than the first, in Waiting for Godot only a little shorter, in Happy Days considerably shorter. This might 48 1968 THE CHAIN AND THE CIRCLE 49 be regarded as a concession (but does Beckett ever make concessions?) to the well-known fact that the spectator or listener is reluctant to stand two parts of the same length. On the other hand, probably no playwright has made a more exacting demand on his audience than Beckett by the absolutely identical repetitions in Play. In the other two-act plays, how does the second act compare to the first? In Waiting for Godot it is characterized by only a few changes, especially by the degradation of Pozzo and Lucky. In Happy Days the second act shows a clear aggravation of the situation, but hardly any change in the relationship of characters. The second action of Act Without Words II is a contrast and parallel to the first. In classical drama the intervals between acts are filled with events which will be reported afterwards. Events happen in the interval in Waiting for Gadot too: Estragon is beaten again, his shoes are changed, the tree sprouts a few leaves, Pozzo becomes blind and Lucky dumb. The second act then, does not present new actions, but a slightly altered resumption of Act I. There is nothing to prevent a third act from following the second, a third act which would again be identical (Play), or again represent the first part of the contrasting couple (Act without Words II) or take the situation one step nearer to the end (Winnie in Happy Days no longer visible, but only heard as a voice from under the soil). Because of these second acts, which in fact· are nothing but an intensified repetition of the first, we may conveniently consider Beckett's two-act plays as...