Waiting for Something

I. Graphic Novel II. Encyclopedia III. Scholarly Journals IV. Today

Layer I

The Graphic Novel

Four chapters in ink. Read the panels; the notes in the margin connect each scene to history.

A gaunt writer at a Paris café table

Chapter 1 · Margin note

Beckett writes in French — 'to write without style.' Sartre and Camus fill the cafés with talk of a universe without inherent meaning.

Two figures waiting by a bare tree

Chapter 2 · Margin note

Waiting for Godot premieres. Critics are baffled. Audiences return night after night to watch nothing happen — twice.

Chairs multiplying in a room, a rhinoceros at the window

Chapter 3 · Margin note

The Bald Soprano (1950) turns an English phrasebook into a nightmare. Rhinoceros (1959) shows a town surrendering, one citizen at a time, to the herd.

An empty stage with a single tree in a spotlight

Chapter 4 · Margin note

In The Maids (1947) and The Balcony (1957), identity is a costume. Esslin names the movement in 1961. The stage stays empty, waiting for us.

To be continued… (it isn't).

"Nothing to be done."

— Estragon, Waiting for Godot, Act I

A theatre history project in four layers.