Images of Beckett - Index of

had a remarkable ability to draw on his knowledge
of one artistic medium and see its possibilities for
transformation and use in another.
Beckett himself pointed us in this particular
direction. One day, when he was standing in the
Nationalgalerie in Berlin with a friend, the theatre
scholar, Ruby Cohn, in front of Caspar David
Friedrich’s painting, Mann und Frau den Mond
betrachtend (Man and Woman Observing the Moon)
he commented memorably: ‘You know that is the
source of Waiting for Godot.’ The painting he had
in mind was, in fact, the very similar Zwei Männer
betrachten den Mond (Two Men Observing the Moon)
from Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie, which he had
seen during an artistic pilgrimage to Germany in
1937. Friedrich’s painting lay behind the way in
which, when he directed the play himself at the
Schiller Theatre in Berlin, Beckett imagined the
scene at the end of both acts in which the two
tramps, standing by a skeletal tree, were
silhouetted against the moonlit sky. He even wrote
the artist’s name ‘K. D. Friedrich’ on a page of his
directorial notebook, which faced his analysis of
the moonlight scene. 18 He did not attempt – at that
point in the play, at least – to copy the actual
postures of the two observers in the Friedrich
painting, in which both figures were painted from
the back looking together at the moon, one with
his arm placed affectionately around his
companion’s shoulder. Instead, first Vladimir and
then Estragon turned separately to contemplate the
Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard in Waiting for Godot, 1997
IMAGES OF BECKETT 53