Waiting for Godot by Irish writer Samuel Beckett was performed to a mixed response of adulation and incomprehension in Paris in 1952. Theatre of the absurd, this tragic-comic drama of human impotence features two starving yet optimistic tramps, Vladimir and Estragon. Beckett was a member of the French Resistance during the war, and the play is a poignant rendition of the human desire to believe in protective and meaningful forces in the midst of senseless suffering, brutality and exile.