Ballocksed, Banjaxed or Banjoed: Textual Aberrations, Ghost Texts, and the British Godot

Censorship details of the London premiere, publication, and revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot have been much discussed in the critical discourse, but that discussion has seldom been based on the complete primary documents. As a result, erroneous and unverified information has been disseminated. In fact, the notes and correspondence in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives, proscriptions demanded by the official protectors of British decency, tell a story richer and substantially different from the received wisdom on these issues. In the case of Godot, the tussle between Beckett and his London producer, Donald Albery, on the one hand, and on the other, three of the Lord Chamberlain’s principal deputies, Sir Vincent Troubridge, Sir Norman Gwatkin, and C.D. Heriot, suggests an exchange that threatened the British production of the play. It created an atmosphere, moreover, in which English publisher Faber and Faber believed that it could offer only a sanitized version of the play in 1956.