Submitted to

Ma'am Rahat Ch.

Programme
BS English
Semester
8th
Subject
Modern and absurd drama

Submitted by
Muhammad Ismail Buzdar
BSF1703762
University of Education, Lahore(Multan campus)

Muhammad Ismail Buzdar

University of Education Lahore
bsf1703762@ue.edu.pk

Abstract:
The “Theater of the Absurd” is a designation given to certain plays,
written by some European playwrights that became famous in the 1940’s and
1950’s. This term, “Theater of the Absurd,” was coined by the Hungarian-born
critic Martin Esslin in his 1962 book published with the same title. Esslin got the
idea of absurd from the French philosopher Albert Camus, in his essay “The
Myth of Sisyphus.” Even though this kind of theater arose after the Second
World War, it has its origins in Ancient Greece, mainly with Aristophanes’
theater. Later, we can find some absurdist elements in the Middle Ages. Also,
German Expressionism contributed to the development of these elements.
Finally, World War II was the event that brought the Theater of the Absurd to
life.
The plays of the Theater of the Absurd are characterized by nonsense
dialogues, repetitive or meaningless action, and non-realistic or impossible
plots. The most well-known play is Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

The story of modern drama is a tale of extremes, testing both audiences and actors to their limits through
hostility and contrarianism. Spanning 1880 to the present, Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction
shows how truly international a phenomenon modern drama has become, and how vibrant and diverse in
both text and performance. It explores the major developments of modern drama, covering two decades
per chapter, from early modernist theatre through post-war developments to more recent and
contemporary theatre. The emergence of new theories from the likes of Brecht and Beckett are tracked
alongside groundbreaking productions to illuminate the fascinating evolution of modern drama.

Keywords:
Absurd Theater; Eugene Ionesco; Samuel Beckett; Waiting for Godot,audience, metatheatre, naturalism,
performance, realism, symbolism, text, theatre.

Introduction:
"The sea" is a play written in 1973 by Edward Bond. It is a comedy set in a small seaside village in the
rural East Anglia. "The Sea" is a modern drama. It breaks from the established theatrical conventions.
Modern drama deals with realism, absurdism etc. While traditional drama deals with fate, heroic deeds
etc
.
Poster of original production

Critical analysis of
"The Sea"
Bond’s play is subtitled ‘A Comedy’. It was written, straight after Lear, as an antidote to the remorseless
theatrical experience of early play. In The Sea, Bond shows the ability of human beings to survive the
worst, to retain their optimism, and not to be brought down by the lunacy and injustice of the world they
live in:
I wanted very much in The Sea to look at the same sorts of problems but this time to put the emphasis on
the strength of people, on their ability to change their society… So wanted to make people laugh and
experience human strength.’
‘This is not to say that The Sea in any way encourages com­placency. The tightly knit society of a small
town on the East Coast of England is a battleground over which the victims of an oppressive and morally
impoverished culture wander in mad distraction. Alternatively, they hide away in disgust at what they have
seen. The town is isolated on the edge of the sea; the effect is of a society sealed off from the outside
world and from any poten­tial for change. Bond sets the play at a precise moment in time-it is 1907, and
the iron-clad values of Edwardian England are leading inexorably to the disasters of the early twentieth
century.’
It is a world ludicrously bent on self-destruction – just like that of Early Morning. The central character is
another Bondian innocent. Willy Carson, is a young man who slowly awakens to the horrors around him.
He is not a heroic figure, but a very ordinary man who is forced by circumstance into trying to understand
his world.
Willy and Arthur both come close to being overwhelmed by cynicism and despair, but they survive, and
Bond expresses through them his conviction that society can be changed. Their reactions inevitably
involve a rejection of the world as they know it: at the end of both plays, they are seen moving out of the
irrational world the other characters inhabit as though abandoning it as lost. Their action is a rejection of
their present, but it also signifies the chance for a better future.
" The Sea" is the source of the strong thread of social satire that runs through it. Mrs. Rafi, the village
dictator by virtue of her supreme upper middle-class self-assurance, is the Edwardian equivalent of the
lady of the manor; she and her entourage of genteel middle-class ladies are characterised as figures of
fun, unaware of the emptiness of their posturings and the hollowness of their values. To mock their
pretensions, Bond uses a more conventional comic approach than in any of the earlier plays. Mrs. Rafi is
essentially a grande dame in the tradition of English high comedy.
The satirical comedy is one element in the play. Bond is concerned to show the effects of a rigidly
sectionalised society on its victims. Mrs. Rafi practises a form of mental and emotional violence on all
those beneath her – as Rose says late in the play: ‘The town’s full of her cripples.’ Her main victim is the
draper, Hatch, a tradesman who uneasily straddles the two worlds – that of me working class (Hollarcut,
Thompson and Carter, the village men whom he influences with his ideas) and that of his genteel
middle-class customers, to whom he is obliged to display an attentive servility. Unable to give direct
expression to the antagonism he feels, he redirects his hostility. His fears of an alien invasion of England
from outer space may be lunatic and unreal, but they find very real expression in his attitude towards Willy
and Evens.
Evens and Hatch represent two extreme poles of social response, as Bond explained: ‘My play is
pointedly about sanity and insanity, and the town represents the dilemma of entrapment. The 8o-year old
man, Evens, is the sane one. The rest are manic about their entrapment.’
What finally drives Hatch mad is not so much his sense of the unjust way that his society is organised, as
the fact that he is forced to suppress his feelings about the real causes of these injustices -his aggression
is directed not at Mrs. Rafi but at alternative scape­goats.
Three main elements, then, are interwoven in The Sea: the world of Mrs. Rafi, expressed mainly through
high comedy; the barely controlled paranoia of Hatch; and Willy’s growing matur­ity and understanding,
partly under the tutelage of Evens, together with his dawning relationship with Rose, Mrs. Rafi’s niece and
the fiancee of Willy’s drowned friend.
The dramatic pattern that Bond forges from these three ele­ments is very carefully shaped, as an
examination of the distri­bution of main characters through the play. Willy is there almost throughout.He
witnesses the effect that Mrs. Rafi has on Hatch. In scene two he comes into the shop after Hatch’s
fawning attempt to sell the curtain material and gloves to her, and Willy’s other meetings with Hatch
consist entirely of the series of bizarre encounters on the beach and on the cliff- top.
Hatch appears in most of the scenes; the prominence Bond gives to this character underlines the
importance he attaches to keeping Hatch’s failure to cope with the social pressures exerted on him
constantly in the audience’s mind.
The first clues are laid as we watch Mrs Rafi systematically humiliate Hatch. She grudgingly selects her
curtain material, then rejects the gloves he has on offer; the tension caused by his subser­vient social
position and by the precariousness of his livelihood, at the mercy of Mrs. Rafi’s whims, are clear to see.
In a way, the changes we see in Hatch – the different Versions’ of his character presented over
the short space of two scenes – make perfect sense: it’s a truism that human beings behave dif­ferently in
different situations. The changes in Hatch are shown not as subtle gradations from a secure and
established reference-point, but as a series of apparently contrasting statements. The audience’s
perception of the character is formed out of this dialectic and from an understanding of the situations in
which we see him.
When Colin is dead, Willy is alive, and he must face the world as it is. We see his mind is still
locked on thoughts of Colin and his death. In next scenes, Willy is self-absorbed and relatively withdrawn.
The rehearsal scene is one of two comic highlights in The Sea. It is a wicked parody of the worst kind of
village hall amateur theatri­cals. By the standards of, say, Early Morning, the comic effects are quite
conventional- the scene is structured on one basic comic principle: the idea of constant interruption. As
Mrs. Rafi struggles to inspire her cast, she is frustrated by a combination of external circumstance and
individual recalcitrance. Mrs. Tilehouse also questions the appropriateness of Mrs. Rafi’s star turn.
The mood of the scene switches from comedy to near melo­drama to periods of calm – the audience is
never allowed to relax into a settled response. Ironically, we see two sides of Hatch with which we are
already familiar- they are different sides of the same coin, in that both are ways of coping with his role in
society, but whereas his ingratiating manner towards Mrs. Rafi is consciously adopted, his vision of alien
invasions, although rationally and coherently expressed, is not a conscious mechanism for survival: it is a
form of displacement activity, a transference of aggression from its natural target in the real world to a
fantasy substitute. The connection between Hatch’s paranoid interpretation of other people’s behav­iour
and his own struggle to survive is made in his conversation with Hollarcut and the others – his instinct is
to see anyone who poses a threat to him as in league with the creatures who are out to subvert his
world.Hatch has the cool logic of the self-assumed prophet. But his mask of rationality, or
reasonableness, crumbles in the face of Mrs. Rafi’s ultimate blow to his livelihood: because of his
derelic­tion of duty in failing to help Willy in the storm, she refuses to accept the 162 yards of blue velvet
curtain material he has ordered for her. Her action triggers off the comic frenzy that typifies the rest of the
scene. Hatch’s first reaction is to make excuses for his behaviour, but there is more than a trace of
exasperation in his voice. But the seriousness of Hatch’s predicament, and the sense of the agony of long
years of oppression bursting to the surface, is counterbalanced by sharply comic sequences: Hatch’s
hacking of the material is prefaced by Mrs. Rafi sternly leading Thompson, her gardener, out of the shop
by his ear; Hollarcut watches the height of the drama from a safe position behind the counter, ducking his
head down beneath it when things get too hot; Mrs. Tilehouse swoons; and there is a continual,
increasingly frantic coming and going, marked by the clanging sounds of the doorbell.
In last we have sight of Willy trying to convey to an unwill­ing Rose what he remembered of Colin’s
drowning. The calmness and directness of his words is one aspect of this change – although he had
shown evidence of this capacity in his talk with Evens. Willy is capable of being objective about Colin;
Rose continues to romanticise both Colin and her own position, and her stance is entirely negative.But
Willy offers no easy comfort:If you look at life closely it is unbearable. What people suffer, what they do to
each other, how they hate themselves … you should never turn away. If you do you lose everything. Turn
back and look into the fire. Listen to the howl of the flames. The rest is lies. The whole sequence between
Willy and Rose is played out in front of Colin’s dead body, washed up on the shore and lying upstage, at
first unnoticed by them. The body clearly has a metaphorical significance: the action of ‘trying to escape’
is analogous to the situation of Willy and Rose, who have both come close to being swamped by their
own despair. But any metaphorical connotations give way to a more immediate theatrical reality: Willy has
come to terms with the death and has achieved a sane perspective on life and so reacts undramatically to
the body, but the same is not true of Hatch, who arrives on the beach and, thinking himself to be alone,
stabs and hacks at the corpse in the delusion that it’s Willy he is killing. The body is used as a focus for
the contrasting states of mind -and views of the world – that Willy and Hatch have arrived at. Then,
funeral service on the cliff-top disintegrates into chaos when Hatch bursts in upon it; Colin’s ashes,
already dropped, scattered, and carefully swept up by Mrs. Tilehouse with her handkerchief, become a
weapon in Mrs. Rafi’s self-righteous hands-she throws handfuls of them in Hatch’s face .The effect is
overwhelmingly funny. The sound of the guns again shatters the spu­rious solemnity of the occasion.
 It is another broadly comic scene, but the comedy is played off against a number of very sobering
moments. Hatch enters in a frenzy of messianic zeal, believing he has saved the town by killing Willy; he
comes face to face with his supposed victim, very much alive. His bafflement and despair intrude on the
mood of farce, just as his last speech in the play intrudes on the mind. It starts with Hatch afraid: ‘I don’t
know if you’re all ghosts or if you still have time to save yourselves’, and ends with the warning:’. . . no
one can help you now.’
In his delirium, Hatch offers a piercing observation on the town’s inhabitants: they are all ghosts, as Mrs.
Rafi admits to Willy later in the scene, living a dead culture, exercising a morality which consists of stock
responses and pious faces. Although the shakiness of their morality has been exposed, it reasserts itself
as Hatch is dragged away ‘to the town lock up’. Mrs. Rafi regains control of the situation, bossing a surly
Hollarcut into promising to atone for his part in the anarchy by digging her garden.
In the last,it is inevitable that Willy will leave the town: Rose might stay and turn into aversion of
Mrs. Rafi. Bond never has her actually state her decision to leave with him. He indicates it through two
simple actions. First, ‘rose covers the piano with a green or faded dirty white sheet’ – exactly the same
colours Bond specifies for the blanket used to cover Colin’s corpse on the beach. And when Willy
announces his intention to go for a swim in the sea-it is as if by swimming in the same sea in which Colin
drowned he is assert­ing that he has exorcised his former self and can look life in the face – Bond shows
Rose coming to her own decision. It takes no more than a dozen words:
Rose. Will you?
Willy. Oh yes.
He looks at her for a moment and then turns to go.
Rose. Wait. (He stops.) I’ll come down and hold your clothes…
She follows him off, leaving behind the dead past- the covered piano and, by association, Colin’s
drowning. Bond might have ended the play here, if he had merely been aiming for a satisfying theatrical
resolution. Instead, he wrote a last scene which most critics have seen as a postscript, an adden­dum in
which ‘enactment gives way to philosophising’.
In the two preceding scenes we have witnessed Willy’s new strength and resolve. In this last scene we
see that he is still a prey to doubts. The old man confirms what Willy knows – the world full of savagery
and aggression – and Willy openly expresses the weakness he feels: ‘How can you bear to live? I’m not
sure if I can bear it.In these scenes, Willy and Evens serve as a model of the rational, sane society in
which Bond wants the audience to place their trust. We should take hope, as much from the relationship
we have seen them work their way towards as from Evens’s parting words of advice: ‘Go away. You won’t
find any more answers here. . . Remember, I’ve told you these things so that you won’t despair. But you
must still change the world.There is no guarantee of success. That much is implied by the unfinished
sentence that ends the play – Willy’s reply when Rose asks what he has been discussing with Evens: ‘I
came to say goodbye, and I’m glad you -’. Bond leaves room for a literal-minded interpretation, something
like ‘I’m glad you are coming with me’, but the effect is to leave us in a state of suspension.
Waiting for Godot

Introduction:
Waiting for Godot, published in 1949,by Samuel Beckett is a work of absurdism that explores the
existentialist philosophy. Waiting for Godot is English translation of Samuel's own French language
play,En attendant Godot.

Waiting for Godot

Critical analysis of "Waiting for Godot"

Although very existentialist in its characterizations, Waiting for Godot is primarily about hope. The play
revolves around Vladimir and Estragon and their pitiful wait for hope to arrive. At various times during the
play, hope is constructed as a form of salvation, in the personages of Pozzo and Lucky, or even as death.
The subject of the play quickly becomes an example of how to pass the time in a situation which offers no
hope. Thus the theme of the play is set by the beginning:

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

Vladimir: I'm beginning to come round to that opinion.

Although the phrase is used in connection to Estragon's boots here, it is also later used by Vladimir with
respect to his hat. Essentially it describes the hopelessness of their lives.

A direct result of this hopelessness is the daily struggle to pass the time. Thus, most of the play is
dedicated to devising games which will help them pass the time. This mutual desire also addresses the
question of why they stay together. One of the main reasons that they continue their relationship is that
they need one another to pass the time. After Pozzo and Lucky leave for the first time they comment:

V: That passed the time.

E: It would have passed in any case.

And later when Estragon finds his boots again:

V: What about trying them.

E: I've tried everything.

V: No, I mean the boots.

E: Would that be a good thing?

V: It'd pass the time. I assure you, it'd be an occupation.

Since passing the time is their mutual occupation, Estragon struggles to find games to help them
accomplish their goal.

The difficulty for Beckett of keeping a dialogue running for so long is overcome by making his characters
forget everything. Estragon cannot remember anything past what was said immediately prior to his lines.
Vladimir, although possessing a better memory, distrusts what he remembers. And since Vladimir cannot
rely on Estragon to remind him of things, he too exists in a state of forgetfulness.

Another second reason for why they are together arises from the existentialism of their forgetfulness.
Since Estragon cannot remember anything, he needs Vladimir to tell him his history. It is as if Vladimir is
establishing Estragon's identity by remembering for him. Estragon also serves as a reminder for Vladimir
of all the things they have done together. Thus both men serve to remind the other man of his very
existence. This is necessary since no one else in the play ever remembers them:

Vladimir: We met yesterday. (Silence) Do you not remember?

Pozzo: I don't remember having met anyone yesterday. But to-morrow I won't remember having met
anyone to-day. So don't count on me to enlighten you.

Later on the same thing happens with the boy who claims to have never seen them before. This lack of
reassurance about their very existence makes it all the more necessary that they remember each other.
Estragon and Vladimir are not only talking to pass the time, but also to avoid the voices that arise out of
the silence. Beckett's heroes in other works are also constantly assailed by voices which arise out of the
silence, so this is a continuation of a theme the author uses frequently:

E: In the meantime let's try and converse calmly, since we're incapable of keeping silent.

V: You're right, we're inexhaustible.

E: It's so we won't think.

V: We have that excuse.

E: It's so we won't hear.

V: We have our reasons.

E: All the dead voices.

V: They make a noise like wings.

E: Like leaves.

V: Like sand.

E: Like leaves.

Silence.

V: They all speak at once.

E: Each one to itself.

Silence.

V: Rather they whisper.

E: They rustle.

V: They murmur.

E: The rustle.

Silence.

V: What do they say?

E: They talk about their lives.

V: To have lived is not enough for them.

E: They have to talk about it.

V: To be dead is not enough for them.

E: It is not sufficient.

Silence.

V: They make a noise like feathers.

E: Like leaves.

V: Like ashes.

E: Like leaves.

Long silence.

V: Say something!

One of the questions which must be answered is why the bums are suffering in the first place. This can
only be answered through the concept of original sin. To be born is to be a sinner, and thus man is
condemned to suffer. The only way to escape the suffering is to repent or to die. Thus Vladimir recalls the
thieves crucified with Christ in the first act:

V: One of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.

E: What?

V: Suppose we repented.

E: Repented what?

V: Oh . . . (He reflects.) We wouldn't have to go into the details.

E: Our being born?

Failing to repent, they sit and wait for Godot to come and save them. In the meantime they contemplate
suicide as another way of escaping their hopelessness. Estragon wants them to hang themselves from
the tree, but both he and Vladimir find it would be too risky. This apathy, which is a result of their age,
leads them to remember a time when Estragon almost succeeded in killing himself:

E: Do you remember the day I threw myself into the Rhone?

V: We were grape harvesting.

E: You fished me out.

V: That's all dead and buried.

E: My clothes dried in the sun.

V: There's no good harking back on that. Come on.

Beckett is believed to have said that the name Godot comes from the French "godillot" meaning a military
boot. Beckett fought in the war and so spending long periods of time waiting for messages to arrive would
have been commonplace for him. The more common interpretation that it might mean "God" is almost
certainly wrong. Beckett apparently stated that if he had meant "God," he would have written "God".

The concept of the passage of time leads to a general irony. Each minute spent waiting brings death one
step closer to the characters and makes the arrival of Godot less likely. The passage of time is evidenced
by the tree which has grown leaves, possibly indicating a change of seasons. Pozzo and Lucky are also
transformed by time since Pozzo goes blind and Lucky mute.

There are numerous interpretation of Waiting for Godot and a few are described here:

Religious interpretations posit Vladimir and Estragon as humanity waiting for the elusive return of a savior.
An extension of this makes Pozzo into the Pope and Lucky into the faithful. The faithful are then viewed
as a cipher of God cut short by human intolerance. The twisted tree can alternatively represent either the
tree of death, the tree of life, the tree of Judas or the tree of knowledge.

Political interpretations also abound. Some reviewers hold that the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky
is that of a capitalist to his labor. This Marxist interpretation is understandable given that in the second act
Pozzo is blind to what is happening around him and Lucky is mute to protest his treatment. The play has
also been understood as an allegory for Franco-German relations.

An interesting interpretation argues that Lucky receives his name because he is lucky in the context of the
play. Since most of the play is spent trying to find things to do to pass the time, Lucky is lucky because his
actions are determined absolutely by Pozzo. Pozzo on the other hand is unlucky because he not only
needs to pass his own time but must find things for Lucky to do.
Sergeant Musgrave's dance

Introduction:
Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, An Un-historical Parable is a play by English playwright John Arden, written
in 1959 and premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on October 22 of that year. In Arden's introductory note
to the text, he describes it as "a realistic, but not a naturalistic" play.

Analysis:
Most of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is set in a coal-mining town in northern England. The action takes
place in the winter; the town is isolated, thus giving Serjeant Musgrave the chance to carry out his plan. In
the first scene, though, the sergeant and his three soldier-confederates are about to board a canal barge
to take them to the town. A group of soldiers could be going to a mining town either to recruit
soldiers—the recruiting sergeant trying to draw unemployed young men into an unpopular trade was a
familiar sight in England through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—or else to assist the
authorities in putting down civil disturbance. Since the town to which Serjeant Musgrave and his men are
going is a mining town in the middle of a strike (or, the men say, a “lock out” by the employers), the latter
would seem to be a likely explanation. The soldiers in act 1, scene 1, however, seem too nervous for such
obvious explanations, as if they have some private and irregular purpose. They also have a large amount
of baggage with them, including a Gatling gun (an early form of machine gun), which seems out of place
for recruiting and too extreme for crowd control. One of their crates further contains, the audience learns
later, the skeleton of a former comrade, Billy Hicks, who came from the very town to which they are going.
In scene 2, the soldiers’ arrival causes some uncertainty. This scene is set in a neutral place, the bar of a
pub, where both the striking colliers and the town authorities could conceivably be found. In this scene,
the authorities hold the stage: the parson (a clergyman of the Church of England, the established church,
which is closely connected with the upper classes and the government), the constable (a rough equivalent
of an American town sheriff), and the mayor (a mine owner and therefore a major employer). These men
all assume that Musgrave must have come to their assistance, though they have not sent for him. He can
help the constable maintain order, they surmise, or maybe he will recruit some of the
striker-troublemakers and take them overseas. All assume that he can be bought.

In scene 3, the audience is shown that this assumption is a desperate mistake. Musgrave sends his men
to scout the town, and they meet in a graveyard. As the soldiers begin to squabble, Musgrave asserts his
authority, especially on Hurst, whom it is clear that he can dominate because Hurst is a known criminal,
on the run for murdering an officer and living in terror of the gallows. Musgrave, however, is in some way
or other on the run too; if nothing else, he has embezzled army money and stolen army property. At the
end of this scene, and of act 1, Musgrave appears as an Old Testament prophet, dedicated to scourging
sin and vice for some reason—and in some way—of his own. He tries to show the colliers (who threaten
him in the graveyard) that he is on their side; he calls God to approve his “Deed” and his “Logic.”

Act 2 returns to Mrs. Hitchcock’s bar, this time occupied by the colliers. One clash in scene 1 is between
the colliers and the constable, who tries to close down the bar. Another is between Musgrave and the
slatternly Annie. She has had an illegitimate child by Billy Hicks, and she does not know that he is dead.
She expects now to sleep with one or all of the soldiers. Musgrave, however, strongly disapproves of this
promiscuity, though not exactly of her, seeing her sexuality as a betrayal in some way of God’s (and
Musgrave’s) plan.

Musgrave has meanwhile won over the colliers, to some extent, by lavish supplies of drink. They now
think that he has come to recruit them and are not totally against the idea. Their spokesman, Walsh,
nevertheless is clever enough to see recruitment as a possible employers’ plot, and he tries to intimidate
Musgrave into leaving. He rejects Musgrave’s assurance that he is really—if in an unexplained way—on
the colliers’ side.

The final scene in act 2 is the most complex to that point, and it demands careful staging. Briefly, Annie
goes in turn to Hurst, to Attercliffe, and to Sparky. Hurst rejects her advances because he is in awe of
Musgrave. Attercliffe is mostly sorry for her. Sparky, finally, is afraid of what Musgrave is going to do and
tries to get Annie to flee with him. When the others realize what is afoot, there is a scuffle, and Sparky is
accidentally killed with a bayonet. In between these events, Musgrave is seen in the grip of a nightmare,
and an attempt is made by Walsh to steal the Gatling gun. Musgrave calms the frightened mayor by
saying that he will begin recruiting the next day, in the marketplace.

The next day, though, with all assembled at the start of act 3, Musgrave’s plan becomes clear at last. The
sergeant has been driven mad—or perhaps sane—by remorse. In a far country of the British Empire,
terrorists killed one of his men, Billy Hicks. In the ensuing roundup, five innocent civilians, including
perhaps a child, were killed. Their deaths are on Musgrave’s conscience and he has decided to avenge
them. However, he cannot harm his men, for they, too, are victims. Revenge must fall on those who sent
them: the British public and the British rulers. In the square, he sets up his Gatling gun and explains that
“logic” demands that if five civilians were killed for one soldier, then five times five Britons must die for the
civilians. In a macabre gesture, he runs his flag up the flagpole: It is the skeleton of Annie’s lover, Billy
Hicks.

The massacre is halted by the arrival of other soldiers, the dragoons sent for by the mayor. Hurst is shot
and Musgrave overpowered by the bargeman who brought them to the town in the first place. Order is
restored in a drink-and-dance scene joined even by Walsh; only Annie sits out—with the skeleton. In a
final short scene, Musgrave and Attercliffe moralize, waiting for the gallows.

References:
•Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot, London, 1953, Kierkegaard and Camus,
Myth of Sisyphus(1849) Oxford Advance Dictionary: University Press New York 2000 6thEdition and 7th
Edition. 2005. Macmillan History of Literary Criticism by Harry Blamires. 1987 Phillip Rice, Patricia Waugh
and Edward Arnold; Modern Literary Theory. London 1986. www. Microsoft Encarta/Google 2010.

•Residenztheatre Munchen; Samuel Beckett’s

•Waiting for GodotWikipedia; Samuel Beckett’s

•Waiting for Godot in relation to Absurdism.

•Billington, Michael. ‘‘Finney as Musgrave,’’ in Manchester Guardian Weekly, June 3, 1984, p. 20.

•‘‘Black Jack’s Prayer,’’ in Newsweek, March 21, 1966, p. 98.

•Brien, Alan. ‘‘Disease of Violence,’’ in the Spectator, October 30, 1966.

•Clurman, Harold. A review of Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance in The Nation, March 28, 1966, p. 372.

•Hewes, Henry. ‘‘Journey Into a North Wind,’’ in Saturday Review, March 26, 1966, p. 45.