GODOT IS A PUZZLE, HOWEVER YOU PRONOUNCE IT

Godot is a big name in theatre. How do you say that name? Depends.

- ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Actor Brandon J. Dirden articulates a variation on the word Godot at least a dozen times a night in New York’s current Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. As he speaks, vowels and consonants dance around in his mouth, emerging as Godet, Goday, Godan, Godin, Gahdeh.

Dirden plays Pozzo, an aristocratic man who chances on two tramps, Didi and Gogo, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. When told that they are waiting for a man named Godot, Dirden cheerfully massacres the name, accenting a French pronunciation (Beckett wrote the original in French) with a viscous Southern twang.

"As if this play wasn't confusing enough," he said in a recent phone interview.

Waiting For Godot premiered in Paris in 1953. A bleak and tender tragicomedy, it has delighted audiences and bedevilled scholars ever since. While Beckett was famously strict about how his work should be staged — a rigour now steadfastly upheld by his estate — he never stipulated what Godot represented or even how it should be pronounced. Which means that each production has to decide for itself.

"It’s really a mind trip," Dirden said. There's no real unanimity when it comes to pronunciation. But there are norms.

In England and Ireland, Beckett’s birthplace, the first syllable, the God part, is accented. In the United States, the second syllable is usually favoured. And in France, the syllables are stressed more or less equally.