The recognition scene of Waiting for Godot takes place immediately after Pozzo’s justly-famous “birth astride a grave” speech, but it is not this speech which constitutes the final recognition of the play. This belongs to Vladimir, and it is not the unveiling of a narrative truth but of a metaphysical truth, suggested by Pozzo’s monologue and Vladimir’s own experience. It is significant that Vladimir’s recognition speech is delivered solus, in a very rare moment of complete isolation and solitude of a character onstage, the child-like Estragon sleeping peacefully beside him; it is delivered as an aside, especially to himself, and is not dissimilar to the recognition of the single character in Krapp’s Last Tape a few years later.

Vladimir extrapolates from Pozzo’s speech his own situation, but broadens it to include the phenomenal world: “Was I sleeping while the others suffered?” Vladimir’s question also recognizes the suffering of those outside of himself (and is followed by an expression of compassion for his “friend” Estragon), but this recognition leads neither to Dionysian joy nor to resignation — in tragedy a response of the audience, not the characters — but to a terror and angry fear of nothingness and his own insignificance that fully emerges when his thoughts are interrupted by the second arrival of Godot’s boy. (Note especially, in this production, Barry McGovern’s extraordinary grimace upon the boy’s appearance.) Like the later plays of Beckett, the conclusion of Waiting for Godot is not calculated to provide comfort, in a production which appears to be inspired by Beckett’s and Walter Asmus’ own production of the play in Beckett’s final years. The humor of the final moments is poignant, not hilarious, and underscores the play’s melancholy rather than undermines it; in terms of classical tragic structure, it is a denouement, a falling-off, which follows Vladimir’s sublime expression.

In the below excerpt, Michael Lindsay-Hogg directs Barry McGovern as Vladimir, Johnny Murphy as Estragon and Sam McGovern as the boy in the 2001 production for the Beckett on Film project.