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60 free Waiting for Godot trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Waiting for Godot is the play in which nothing happens, twice, and it turns out there is a great deal to ask about it. This quiz covers the text itself: the country road and the tree, Didi and Gogo's bowlers and boots, Pozzo's rope, Lucky's one speech, the boy who says Godot will surely come tomorrow, and the rope the two men do not have. It also covers Beckett's own cryptic hints, from the Caspar David Friedrich painting that inspired it to the racing cyclist called Godeau and the flat insistence that women 'don't have prostates'. Then it follows the play around the world: the shoestring 1953 Paris premiere, the German prisoner who translated it, the London walkouts of 1955 and the two Sunday reviews that saved it, the Miami fiasco billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents', San Quentin, Sarajevo, post-Katrina New Orleans, and casts from Bert Lahr and Mel Gibson to McKellen and Stewart and Bill & Ted on Broadway. A final stretch covers Beckett himself: Foxrock, Joyce, the pimp who stabbed him, the Resistance, the Nobel and Wisden. Easy questions suit anyone who studied the play at school; the expert tier asks what Estragon calls himself in the American edition. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the play and its author, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
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Q 01Who wrote Waiting for Godot?
Samuel Beckett
The Irish playwright wrote it in French first, then made his own English adaptation.
Q 02What is the play's original French title?
En attendant Godot
Beckett composed it between October 1948 and January 1949 and later translated it into English himself.
Q 03What pet names do Vladimir and Estragon call each other?
Didi and Gogo
The boy, meanwhile, addresses Vladimir as 'Mister Albert'.
Q 04What is the play's subtitle?
A tragicomedy in two acts
There is only one scene throughout both acts.
Q 05In a 1998 Royal National Theatre poll, Waiting for Godot was voted what?
The most significant English-language play of the 20th century
Not bad for a play whose 1955 London first-night audience walked out in waves.
Q 06Which two other characters arrive in each act, one driving the other with a whip?
Pozzo and Lucky
In Act II Pozzo has gone blind and Lucky is fully mute.
Q 07Where does the play take place?
On a country road by a tree
The tree is bare in Act I and has grown a few leaves by Act II, though the script says it is only the next day.
Q 08What does the boy tell Vladimir and Estragon at the end of each act?
Godot will not come tonight but surely tomorrow
In Act II he insists he is not the same boy who came the day before, which sends Vladimir into a rage.
Q 09What do Vladimir and Estragon lack when they consider hanging themselves at the end of Act II?
A rope
They resolve to bring one tomorrow, say they will go, and do not move.
Q 10Who directed the play's world premiere in Paris in January 1953?
Roger Blin
A shy, lean man, he ended up playing the stout Pozzo himself with a pillow up his shirt after the original actor took a better-paid job.
Q 11At which small Paris theatre did Waiting for Godot premiere?
Théâtre de Babylone
The first thirty-day run began on 5 January 1953; Lucky's battered suitcase had been fished out of the city's rubbish.
Q 12Which critic famously summed the play up as one 'in which nothing happens, twice'?
Vivian Mercier
He called it 'a theoretical impossibility', a play in which nothing happens that keeps audiences glued to their seats.
Q 13Which critic coined the label 'Theatre of the Absurd' that Godot became the emblem of?
Martin Esslin
His 1960 study traced the movement back to the absurdist philosophy of Camus.
Q 21One story about the origin of the name Godot involves Beckett waiting for whom outside a velodrome?
A racing cyclist called Godeau
Another version has spectators at the Tour de France telling him 'Nous attendons Godot'.
Q 22According to Beckett, how should the name Godot be pronounced?
With the stress on the first syllable
He called the North American 'g'DOH' a mistake, though his agent always used equal French stress.
Q 23Beckett once told an actor that the play was 'all about' what?
Symbiosis
Q 14Beckett said which 1819 painting was a major inspiration for the play?
Two Men Contemplating the Moon
He saw the Caspar David Friedrich canvas on a journey in 1936.
Q 15What single item of clothing did Beckett say he was sure Vladimir and Estragon wore?
Bowler hats
He told the director he could hear their voices but not describe them, apart from the bowlers his father had always worn.
Q 16Which comedy double act do Vladimir and Estragon's bowlers and hat games evoke?
Laurel and Hardy
Critic Gerald Mast called the hat routine and Lucky's inability to think without his hat 'obvious derivations' from the pair.
Q 17What single command from Pozzo triggers Lucky's only speech, a torrent of pseudo-academic nonsense?
Think!
One critic called the monologue 'a flood of completely meaningless gibberish'.
Q 18The first actor to play Lucky gave him the symptoms of which condition, to Beckett's approval?
Parkinson's disease
Beckett said 'Yes, of course', mentioning that his own mother had the disease.
Q 19Why did Beckett say Lucky was so named?
Because he has no more expectations
Beckett gave all the English names and places in the play to Lucky when translating it.
Q 20Beckett noted he wrote Waiting for Godot in French, where the word for 'God' is what?
Dieu
He later regretted the name because of all the God theories it spawned.
'It's all symbiosis, Peter,' he told Peter Woodthorpe in a taxi.
Q 24Who directed the play's English-language UK premiere at London's Arts Theatre in August 1955?
Peter Hall
He told the cast in rehearsal, 'I haven't really the foggiest idea what some of it means'.
Q 25Which two critics' Sunday reviews in August 1955 turned the London Godot into 'the rage of London'?
Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson
Until then audiences had walked out in droves and the cast took a scant three curtain calls on opening night.
Q 26At the 1955 Evening Standard Drama Awards, opposition to Godot winning the top prize led to what?
A new category, Most Controversial Play of the Year
Sir Malcolm Sargent had threatened to resign if it won; the prize has never been given since.
Q 27Which official insisted on cuts to the London script, including removing the word 'erection'?
The Lord Chamberlain
'Fartov' became 'Popov' and Mrs Gozzo had 'warts' instead of 'clap'; the first uncut version opened only in December 1964.
Q 28In which city was the first US production of Waiting for Godot billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents'?
Miami
The audience of holidaymakers left after Act I and taxi drivers waited outside to take them home.
Q 29Which comedian, famous as the Cowardly Lion, played Estragon in the 1956 Broadway premiere?
Bert Lahr
Brooks Atkinson praised him, and the production was recorded as a two-record album by Columbia.
Q 30A landmark 1957 performance of Godot was given for 1,400 inmates at which prison?
San Quentin
The inmates founded a drama group that went on to stage seven Beckett works, and Beckett later befriended ex-prisoner Rick Cluchey.