Book of a Lifetime: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

From The Independent archive: Meg Rosoff on ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett

Patrick Stewart, left, as Vladimir and Ian McKellen as Estragon in Sean Mathias’s 2013 production of ‘Waiting for Godot’ (AP)

A couple of tramps, an off-stage potentate with a made-up name who never materialises, a strange slave at the end of a rope spouting nonsense (or is it?). A slave master. A little boy. And that’s it. What happens? Well, nothing of course. They wait. They say “let’s go.” They do not move. I first read Waiting For Godot when I was 15.

Beckett’s black humour and bracing nihilism appealed wonderfully to a suburban teenager in the throes of an existential crisis (the first of many). When Vladimir says, “In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness,” he seemed to answer the exact questions my middle-class Judeo-Christian education had failed to address. Life was not about sweating daily in frantic denial of the human condition, collecting objects that would be thrown in a skip upon our demise.