Platonic Dramaturgy in Modernist Drama Waiting for Godot as Socratic Dialogues

Abstract

Although Plato is usually known as an anti-theatre figure, many studies have been done on his Socratic dialogues as dramatic texts. The dramatic characteristics of Plato’s dialogues rely most on its ‘diegetic’ feature, meaning ‘narrative’, away from the ‘mimetic’ or ‘imitative’ performance. This Platonic dramaturgy was revived in modernist drama due to the resistance against realistic imitation, the prevalence of philosophical concepts, and anti-Aristotelian structures. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of the best examples of this modernist ‘diegetic drama’, which realizes philosophical matters in a dialectical process, through diegetic speech-oriented text, with the least imitative action on stage. It is not that diegetic dramas do not have performance capabilities, but they have the potential to be realized only in the form of dialogues and narratives; a feature similar to Socratic dialogues. This paper seeks to discuss these features of Waiting for Godot aligned with Platonic dramaturgy.