Michael Chanan

Two letters in the Guardian this week past caught my attention. The first concerns the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Murray Marshall of Salisbury writes:

• The obituary for Timothy Bateson (Obituary, 8 November) mentioned the difficulties that original cast had with grasping the meaning of Waiting for Godot. The author himself was apparently not a lot of help. A friend of mine was assistant stage manager on the first production, and the cast and crew eagerly awaited Beckett’s visit to a rehearsal. They assembled after performing to be enlightened by the great man. After a suitably Beckettian interval, he said: “The pauses were not long enough.”

I also have a story about this, which comes from the horse’s mouth, or anyway, Peter Hall, who directed that first production in 1955. Many years ago, when I was taken to visit him at his house near Wallingford, he told us what happened when they played in Blackpool before coming to London, and the audience was mystified and bored. Someone noticed that the last train back to London on a Saturday night left before their scheduled finish, so in order to catch it, they decided to eliminate the pauses. The play went by like a flash, the audience found it very funny and laughed a lot, and they got their train!

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The second letter is an altogether more serious matter. This is from almost 200 student union officers warning MPs that unless they sign a pledge to vote against an increase in fees, they will be named and shamed. Read more