Both Plays, End to End

A country road. A tree. Evening. That is the whole set. Estragon sits on a low mound struggling to pull off his boot, and gives up with the play's first words: “Nothing to be done.” Vladimir arrives and takes the phrase to mean something much larger — he has been coming round to the same opinion all his life.

They are waiting for a man called Godot. They are not sure this is the right tree, nor the right day, nor whether they came yesterday. Estragon was beaten again in the night, in a ditch, by men he cannot describe. Vladimir worries at the story of the two thieves crucified with Christ: one was saved, but only one Evangelist out of four mentions it — and all four were there.

Twice they consider hanging themselves from the tree, and twice they talk themselves out of it — first because the bough might break under the heavier man and leave the other alone, then because they have no rope. Estragon asks for a carrot; Vladimir hands him a turnip by mistake, then finds the last carrot. Estragon says the carrot is like life: the more you eat, the worse it gets. Vladimir says the opposite — he gets used to the muck as he goes along.

Then Pozzo enters, driving Lucky before him by a rope round the neck, with a whip. Lucky carries a heavy bag, a stool, a basket and a coat, and never puts them down. Vladimir calls the sight “a scandal!” and Estragon adds “A disgrace!” Pozzo eats his chicken and throws the bones down; Estragon must ask Lucky's permission before taking them, since “in theory the bones go to the carrier”. Lucky says nothing.

Pozzo announces that he is taking Lucky to the fair to sell him, after nearly sixty years of service. Lucky weeps. Estragon goes to wipe his tears and is kicked violently in the shins. Pozzo delivers two great speeches: the tears of the world are a constant quantity — for each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops — and night, behind its veil of gentleness, is charging and will burst upon us pppfff! just when we least expect it.

To entertain them, Pozzo orders Lucky to dance — a shuffle Pozzo says has been called “the Net”, since Lucky believes himself caught in one — and then to think. The hat goes on and Lucky pours out a torrent about a personal God, “with white beard, outside time”, who “loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown”, and about man who, despite tennis, sports and science, “wastes and pines”. They tear the hat off to stop him. Pozzo and Lucky leave.

A Boy arrives — after they have gone, because he was afraid of the whip and the roars. He minds Mr Godot's goats; his brother minds the sheep, and Mr Godot beats the brother, not him. The message: Godot will not come this evening, but surely tomorrow. Vladimir makes him promise to say that he has seen them. The moon rises. “Well, shall we go?” “Yes, let's go.” They do not move.

Same road, same tree — except that the tree now has four or five leaves. Vladimir enters singing an endless round about a dog beaten to death for stealing a crust, a song that begins again at its own end. Estragon has been beaten again and remembers nothing: not the tree, not Pozzo, not Lucky, not yesterday.

They pass the time. They abuse each other and make up. They try on hats. Estragon sleeps, and this time — the last time — Vladimir does not wake him. Then Pozzo and Lucky return, and fall. Pozzo is blind; Lucky is dumb. The master who held the rope must now be led by the slave.

Vladimir makes his one attempt at moral seriousness — “Let us do something, while we have the chance! All mankind is us, whether we like it or not” — and then falls over trying to help. Asked when he went blind, Pozzo explodes: “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”

They go. Estragon sleeps. Vladimir, alone, speaks the play's most quoted meditation: “Was I sleeping while the others suffered?… Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?” He looks at his sleeping friend: “He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. Habit is a great deadener.”

The Boy comes again with the same message and denies ever having come before: “I didn't see anyone, sir.” Estragon's trousers fall down because he has used the cord to test the hanging. They agree to bring a proper rope tomorrow. “Well, shall we go?” says Vladimir. “Yes, let's go,” says Estragon — the lines now swapped. They do not move.

Lady Britomart has a money problem. Her daughter Sarah is to marry Charles Lomax, who has little; her daughter Barbara is to marry Adolphus Cusins, a professor of Greek, who has less; and her son Stephen cannot inherit the family firm, because every Undershaft must leave the business to a foundling. So she has summoned her estranged husband, whom the children barely remember.

Andrew Undershaft arrives: a millionaire maker of cannon, courteous, formidable, and unable to tell which of the young people are his own children. Asked about his religion he says he is a millionaire, and that is his religion. His daughter Barbara is a Major in the Salvation Army. Father and daughter strike a bargain: he will visit her shelter if she will visit his cannon works.

In the yard of the shelter, Snobby Price and Rummy Mitchens eat free bread and cheerfully invent the sins they will confess — he claims to have beaten his mother, she invents a scarlet past. Snobby says he takes whatever is going, like the socialists. Peter Shirley, an honest workman sacked for being too old, comes not for charity but asking for work, and is ashamed to eat.

Then Bill Walker bursts in looking for his girl and strikes Jenny Hill in the face. He cannot get rid of the guilt. He goes off to Canning Town to have himself thrashed by Todger Fairmile as a penance, fails, and comes back to throw down a sovereign. Barbara refuses it: “We want your soul, Bill — not your money.”

The shelter is about to close for lack of funds. Mrs Baines, the Commissioner, arrives with news: Bodger, the whisky distiller, will give £5,000 if five others give £1,000 each. Undershaft, cannon-maker, writes the last cheque on the spot. Mrs Baines accepts with joy. Bill Walker, watching the Army take the money it refused from him, asks the question the whole act has been building to: “Wot prahce salvyshon naow?”

Barbara takes off her badge. Her cry echoes the cross: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Her father has won the first half of the bargain without arguing with her at all — he simply paid.

The family visits the arms works, and it is a shock: a clean, orderly model town with houses, a library, schools, a ballroom and chapels. The workers are well paid, well fed and well behaved. Undershaft does not preach at them; he simply removes their poverty. “You must feed the man first,” he says — nobody can be saved while he is starving.

He offers the business to Cusins, who turns out to qualify as a foundling on a legal technicality: his father married his deceased wife's sister in Australia, a marriage England does not recognise. Cusins bargains hard over salary, then accepts. Barbara asks what he has sold his soul for. “I sell it for reality and power,” he says — not for money.

Undershaft states the armourer's faith, inscribed by every generation: to give arms to all who offer an honest price, without respect of persons or principles. He says cleanliness needs no justification; that it does not matter whether a thing is wrong if it is true; and that democracy will not go hand in hand with anxiety.

And Barbara decides. She does not go back to the Army, she does not make money her religion, and she does not leave Cusins — she marries him and stays at Perivale, to preach where nobody is hungry. “I have got rid of the bribe of bread,” she says. Salvation bought with food was never salvation. She has lost her illusions and found a harder field of work. The play does not resolve the argument; it hands it to the audience.