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Hell isn’t other people | The New Criterion

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Eugène Delacroix, Macbeth Consulting the Witches, 1825, Lithograph; third state of five, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Eugène Delacroix, Macbeth Consulting the Witches, 1825, Lithograph; third state of five, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. by Kevin D. Williamson Reviews of Waiting for Godot and Macbeth. Ihave gone back and forth over the years on whether I think Waiting for Godot is a good play. I’ve seen maybe a half a dozen productions of it, the better of them suggesting, though never quite convincing me, that there is something more to the play than midcentury existential self-pity. The worse of them left me with a deep impression of dread and despair—not of life, the abyss, emptiness, our fundamental aloneness in the universe, or the prospect of ultimate ontological erasure, but of sitting through the second act. Perhaps it is the case that being locked in the darkness waiting for something to end is precisely what one is intended to take away from Samuel Bec

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