Waiting for Godot

A tragicomedy in two acts by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, written in French between 1948 and 1949 as En attendant Godot, first published in 1952 and first performed in Paris in January 1953. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a bare tree for a man named Godot who never arrives, filling the time with vaudeville routines, quarrels and reconciliations while the master Pozzo and his servant Lucky pass through twice. Beckett resisted allegorical readings of the absent Godot, later telling an actor that he regretted the name for the theological associations it invited, and insisted the play's meaning lay in its own bleak comedy rather than any hidden key. In a 1998 poll conducted by London's Royal National Theatre, it was voted the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century, and it remains Beckett's best-known work.