'Waiting for Godot' has become perhaps the most famous and influential play of the last 100 years – and one of the most elusive. It can’t be explained in the usual ways. Its non-story occurs at no particular time and in no identifiable place, except now and in this theatre.

Is it deeply intellectual, more profound even than complicated interpretation can reach? Or is it extremely simple, accessible to the most naïve? The critic Martin Esslin tells of how, in 1957, the prisoners in San Quentin Penitentiary in California watched a performance. They were not theatre-goers and many were barely educated but they were deeply moved by the predicament of Vladimir and Estragon. In fact they understood the play more intensely than the sophisticated audiences of London and Paris, who had been baffled by what they took to be its advanced philosophy.

The San Quentin prisoners were waiting in a vacuum for what may never come and whose nature they can never know. But they did know what emptiness is like. And the play drew them in to the familiar ways that people respond to need, dependency, uncertainty and frustration. They sensed that the play is far more about waiting than it is about Godot. Being stripped of the busy trappings of life as we experience it, the prisoners were closer than us to the elemental road, rocks and tree where 'nothing happens', which is Beckett’s truth in this play.

Put like this, the play can sound pointless and gloomy. But though Beckett is serious in writing the play, he is not sombre in its delivery. He draws on the traditions of farce, comic double-acts and music-hall entertainment. He understands that comedy, even physical comedy, can illuminate truths about human nature. His comedy is more than simply patches of light relief from darkness and tears.

Rehearsing the play has been a stimulating experience, but rather tantalising too. When one of us has tried to explain an idea or a speech or even a line, someone else has welcomed it , but with a 'perhaps'. We have had to make some clear decisions, if only, for example, to choose some costumes, to design the lighting or to deliver a line or a rhythm in a particular way. But we have not set the play in Beirut or prison or beside a motorway or in the 1940s French Resistance. Other productions have made these more precise decisions. You, the audience, are free to apply our production in any of these ways if you wish. We have just tried to offer you a stimulating 'perhaps.'

Stephen Siddall

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