How do you pronounce "Godot"?

Some Beckett specialists, like British director Sean Mathias (who directed the Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart), prefer “GOD-oh.” Others, like New Yorker critic John Lahr (whose father starred in the original American production), favor the more popular “Guh-DOH.” To complicate matters, Beckett’s former agent Georges Borchardt told the New York Times last year that he likes “the French way, with equal emphasis on both syllables.”

The estate of Samuel Beckett is infamously persnickety—it prohibits women from playing the tragic-comic tramps in Waiting for Godot, bars almost all staged readings of Beckett’s radio plays, and once blocked a Parisian production of Footfalls partly because the actor violated the stage directions and went walking in the wrong places—but refuses to shed light on the one question that actors, directors, and critics around the world might like a little help with.

How very Beckettian.

For his precise and orthodox production of Waiting for Godot at ACT Theatre, Seattle Shakespeare Company director George Mount has chosen the less familiar road: GOD-oh. “For a US audience used to Guh-DO, the GOD-o pronunciation makes the name stand out, have more presence when it’s spoken,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I think it makes us more aware of Godot and his importance rather than just being a familiar name we’re already used to before getting in the theater.”

I first encountered Waiting for Godot as a freshman in high school when an English teacher I adored, who’d spent a lot of time in France, recommended I check it out from the school library. (I think I’d asked her was existentialism was—this was her answer.)

I read act one that afternoon on the floor of the library, between the shelves, and finished act two in my bedroom that night. While I couldn’t claim to have completely understood it, when I closed the book, I knew something in my mind had permanently shifted.

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