Waiting for Gordo, by Margaret Beckett

‘You don’t have to be an intellectual to enjoy Beckett.’

A theatre critic, in this centenary year, wrote on Sunday, ‘You don’t have to be an intellectual to enjoy Beckett.’ Many theatregoers must also have thought that, for maximum enjoyment, it helps to be a pseudo-intellectual.

Doubtless plenty of the people at present lauding Beckett are saying what they truly think. But common observation of the way of the world tells us that plenty are not. They are only saying what they think they should say. There have, so far this year, and so far as one can tell, been no dissenting voices about Beckett. That is implausible, suggestive of a climate of fear. This is also a Mozart anniversary year. Several music critics have suggested that some of the earlier operas would not be revived today were they not Mozart’s, and Norman Lebrecht, in the London Evening Standard, even argued that Mozart as such was overrated. So the Mozart year has produced more adverse critics of the universal genius Mozart than of Beckett. Yet Beckett simply cannot be in such an irreproachable category.

But that critic’s view would have reassured those non-intellectuals who have proceeded on the assumption that what we are celebrating is the centenary of Margaret Beckett. She is much liked, always courteous, gracious, and — no disrespect intended — has been part of our national life for a long time. She first became a minister — a whip — when Harold Wilson was still prime minister. Most of us hope and expect that she will serve under Gordon Brown.

To that end, it would be best if A-level students — who often have to study Waiting for Godot — should be taught that this female Beckett is the author of the seminal Waiting for Gordo. Such a play would capture disturbingly, desolatingly, the present bleak world in which when Mr Brown will become prime minister, and how he will differ from Mr Blair when he does, or how he will not differ at all, is the only topic of columnists in the Lib–Lab press.