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.