Googling for Godot: List of links
On July 8 my father’s day present comes into play as we take in an afternoon performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot starring Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) at Haymarket Theatre here in London. As a comic, sci-fi geek and Beckett head, it’s about as perfect a storm as it can get. In honor of the occasion, here are some Godot links from around the websosphere:
1) Official website for the haymarket production.
2) Sparknotes (one of many online Cliff’s Notes knockoffs) commentary on the play.
3) Act I of the 2001 Beckett on Film production of Waiting for Godot. There are links on this page to clips of Act II as well, of varying degrees of quality. The entire Channel 4 Beckett collection is worth a look, as well, though.
4) Waiting for Godot… this guy’s philosophy. This fellow goes on quite a tangent about what Waiting for Godot really means.
5) The Barbie (or Ken, actually) edition. This looks like it was, at some point, a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, copyright (f)laws have rendered this one kind of useless. YouTube apparently found that some part of the track infringed on someone’s rights to sell something. Next to the clip it reads: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.”
Because, you know, I get that. Because someone heard three minutes of something on a YouTube video of some people essentially playing with plastic dolls, will decide, “all right then. No need to buy that now, I’ve experienced it to its fullest right here.” Total sense making. Based on all the blatantly stolen stuff you can find on YouTube, I hadn’t previously thought they actually paid attention to copyright. Interesting. If anyone out there knows where a version is with audio still enabled, let me know and I’ll update the link. However, watching it in silent mode is a slightly creepy, surreal way of testing your memory of the lines.
6) Waiting On Godot. Sitting around wondering when your dealer is going to show up is a real drag. Nothing gets done. And when you get your spliff, well, nothing gets done again. Sort of like the play, in which nothing happens twice. Instead of two tramps waiting in the cold, we have Vicki and Estrella, two London club girls waiting on a sofa for their drug dealer, Godot. Spoiler: He doesn’t show up.
7) An attempt (succes? you decide) at animating the first pages of Waiting for Godot.
8) Arrival of Godot. This is a hand drawn animation made by some student at Armwood High School in 2000. I never had a class this cool in high school.
9) Sesame Street – Monsterpiece Theater “Waiting for Elmo.” You sort of hope he never shows up. Freaking Elmo.
10) Animation: Guinea Pig Theatre’s Waiting for Godot.
11) Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen give good talk on Radio 4. Two of the best voices on film and TV yack about taking Godot on the road. Really, you could listen to these guys talk about anything. Stage experience gives their voices a quality that demands attention.
12) Waiting For Godot: The Interactive Adventure. A must see. Somene has finally done the play justice in the Web 2.0 realm.
13) Clicking for Godot. A review of Waiting for Godot performed in an internet chat room. I guess you had to be there. In “Waiting for Godot,” as one critic famously put it, “nothing happens, twice”; in chat rooms, nothing happens over and over again…”
14) Did Waiting for Godot end the Bosnian war? Susan Sontag had a public square named after her in Sarajevo in honor for putting on production of Waiting for Godot in midst of the war.
15) Waiting For Godot In Sarajevo by David Toole. (Related to the link above) From the book jacket: In Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, David Toole seeks to come to terms with what it means to live a life of dignity in a world of undeniable suffering. Using as his backdrop Susan Sontag’s staging of Act I of Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo, Toole skillfully weaves together Friedrich Nietzsche’s views on nihilism with Michel Foucault’s analysis of power to produce a politics of tragedy, or what Toole calls a “politics of dying.”
16) The script of Waiting for Godot. Hey kids, act it out with your friends.
17) Candle in the Wind – Diana Macbeth Godot Mash Up video. usually I wouldn’t link to such a tripe song, but this mix which includes a Beckett on Film snip of Godot (watch it before YouTube kills this too) is kind of absorbing.
18) West End Whingers. A review of the play which is mostly about the two guys reviewing it, who couldn’t be more like Christopher Guest characters if they tried. Perfect.
Tangent) Magneto Was Right. Nothing to do with the play, really, but someone put an awful lot of work into making the case for the philosophy of the X-Men character Magneto, and you know, they sold me on it. You go, man. Fight the homo sapien dominated power structure.
Power, after all, is not just military strength. It is the social power that comes from democracy, the cultural power that comes from freedom of expression and research, the personal power that entitles every Arab citizen to feel that he or she is in fact a citizen, and not just a sheep in some great shepherd’s flock.
