Extract

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

Two tramps stand by a bare tree on an empty road, waiting for someone who will not come. Samuel Beckett's 1953 play stripped theatre to its bones and discovered that what remains, when plot and scenery and purpose are removed, is the human compulsion to fill silence with talk, to invent games and quarrels and small cruelties, to go on. Vladimir and Estragon bicker, philosophize, eat carrots, contemplate hanging themselves from the tree, and do none of it with any lasting conviction. Pozzo and Lucky pass through like a grotesque parody of master and slave. Nothing happens, twice, and yet the play is inexhaustibly alive, because Beckett understood that waiting is not the absence of life. It is life's most honest description.