What Waiting for Godot Taught Me About Setting the Scene

Author Danai Christopoulou discusses tapping into techniques used in theater and film to write effective liminal spaces in fiction.

- DANAI CHRISTOPOULOU

The first time I watched Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, I was 7 years old. I was bored, baffled. “Nothing happens in this play,” I whispered to my dad, who'd brought me along despite the fact that this was definitely not a children's theater. “They just keep waiting.” “Look closer,” my dad whispered back, eyes crinkling. “Pay attention. The waiting is the point.”

So, I looked closer at the black-curtain clad stage; at the solitary bench the two actors occupied, exchanging quips, a naked tree next to them; at the strategic spotlights that highlighted their faces while the rest of the stage almost disappeared from sight, fading to black. And while I was about three decades too young to make sense of it all—and part of me was miffed we didn't go watch some Disney musical instead—a seed was planted there and then.

A seed that would later sprout and bloom as I began to write fiction.

The waiting was, indeed, the point.

Learning to See the Stage Before Setting It

Growing up in the theater taught me more than I could ever have imagined about storytelling.

My actor parents raised me on a diet of Sophocles and Shakespeare, Chekhov and Brecht—not that they had to try to get me interested in the theater plays that were stacked around our house like precarious Pisa towers. I always had my nose buried in one.