Waiting For Godot - Works Inspired By Godot

Works Inspired By Godot

• The title of the 1997 play by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, A Skull in Connemara, may have been inspired by a line in Lucky's monologue ("alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara...").
• An unauthorised sequel was written by Miodrag Bulatović in 1966: Godo je došao (Godot Arrived). It was translated from the Serbian into German (Godot ist gekommen) and French. The playwright presents Godot as a baker who ends up being condemned to death by the four main characters. Since it turns out he is indestructible Lucky declares him non-existent. Although Beckett was noted for disallowing productions that took even slight liberties with his plays, he let this pass without incident but not without comment. Ruby Cohn writes: "On the flyleaf of my edition of the Bulatović play, Beckett is quoted: 'I think that all that has nothing to do with me.'"
• An unauthorised prequel, of sorts, formed Part II of Ian McDonald's 1991 novel King of Morning, Queen of Day (partly written in Joycean style). Two main characters are clearly meant to be the original Vladimir and Estragon.
• Kevin Smith's 1994 film Clerks follows a Godot-esque model; Dante and Randal being manifestations of Vladmir and Estragon in their perpetual ennui, and Jay and Silent Bob as Pozzo and Lucky (one more dominant, but one with crucial, rare and illuminating monologues).
• In the late 1990s an unauthorised sequel was written by Daniel Curzon entitled Godot Arrives.
• A radical transformation was written by Bernard Pautrat, performed at Théâtre National de Strasbourg in 1979–1980: Ils allaient obscurs sous la nuit solitaire (d'après 'En attendant Godot' de Samuel Beckett). The piece was performed in a disused hangar. "This space, marked by diffusion, and therefore quite unlike traditional concentration of dramatic space, was animated, not by four actors and the brief appearance of a fifth one (as in Beckett's play), but by ten actors. Four of them bore the names of Gogo, Didi, Lucky and Pozzo. The others were: the owner of the Citroën, the barman, the bridegroom, the bride, the man with the Ricard the man with the club foot. The dialogue, consisting of extensive quotations from the original, was distributed in segments among the ten actors, not necessarily following the order of the original."
• French playwright Matei Vişniec (of Romanian origin), wrote his famous play Old Clown Wanted, inspired by Waiting for Godot.
• Matei Vişniec's play, The Last Godot, in which Samuel Beckett and Godot are characters, ends with the first lines in Waiting for Godot.
• In 1996, two films based on the Beckett theme were released. In Waiting for Guffman, a character named Guffman never arrives. And in Big Night, Louis Prima never arrives.
• Godot is a character in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, a mysterious prosecutor whose real name, identity, and prior life are unknown until the ending of the game.
• In the Bollywood film Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, a man is waiting outside an airport with a card saying "Mr. GODOT". He is an old man, which shows that he has probably been waiting for a very long time.
• The music video for k.d. lang's song "Constant Craving" depicts a crowd watching a 1950s production of Waiting for Godot.
• Turkish playwright Ferhan Şensoy's play Güle Güle Godot (Bye Bye Godot) tells about the people of an unnamed country where there is a big problem of water and there is a misgovernor named Godot. The people of the country are waiting for Godot to leave, because they desire to have a country where they are able to select their own governor.
• The Hong Kong drama Fly with Me features a snack shop, named Godot, in a hospital. The shop owner keeps a lost umbrella for years, and waits for its owner to get back.
• A production of Waiting for Godot at Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL), inspired a book of fine art photography entitled God(ot): Psychomorphagical I.
• A cycle of short parodies entitled The Godot Variations (Waiters for Godot, Call Waiting for Godot, Whining for Godot) by American playwright Meron Langsner is included in the Smith & Kraus anthology 2010 Best Ten Minute Plays. Waiters for Godot appeared in the 2003 edition of the literary journal Lamia Ink.
• Sesame street has an episode entitled "Waiting for Elmo", where Grover and TV monster wait endlessly at a dead tree, without Elmo showing up
• The 2004 independent film Waiting for Woody Allen is a parody of Waiting for Godot, a tragic comedy about two quarrelsome Hasidic men who, disillusioned with religion, therapy and their own friendship, wait on a bench in Central Park for Woody Allen to come and give meaning to their lives.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the Tom Stoppard play first performed in 1967, has been identified by some critics as having been influenced by Beckett. The play takes place in and around the action of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
• The song "Sheep Go to Heaven" by Cake (band) takes thematic and lyrical inspiration from 'Waiting for Godot,' particularly from the line "The gravedigger puts on the forceps" and references in the play to sheep and goats.
• The song "Waiting for Godot", by Janina Gavankar takes both it's name and many themes from 'Waiting for Godot'.
• The British comedy Bottom was intended to be a cruder cousin to plays like Waiting for Godot. Perhaps in reference to this, the two stars of Bottom, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, took the roles of Vladimir and Estragon in the 1991 West End production at the Queen's Theatre.