Minoru Betsuyaku wanted to be a painter, but his father died when he was 7, leaving him as the oldest of five sons. Everyone around him said that he would never be able to support his family as an artist, so he entered Tokyo's Waseda University, resolved instead to become a newspaper journalist.
When he was swept up into the drama world there, his relatives remarked that at least painters could make some money -- but theater people just ate up everything a family owned. As the now 69-year-old Betsuyaku quotes, "once a man starts working in theater or being a beggar, they can never stop." Still he persevered, ultimately becoming a Japanese pioneer of absurdist playwriting.
Betsuyaku's latest project is a production of "Godot Came," a work that takes Samuel Beckett's masterpiece, "Waiting for Godot," to a new, post-absurdist level. In Beckett's play -- which was written by the Nobel Prize-winning Irishman in French in 1952 and not translated into English till 1954 -- two characters, Estragon and Vladimir, wait in a wasteland for the mysterious Godot, whose significance is never explained and who never appears. "Waiting for Godot" was immediately received as -- and remains to this day -- the height of the theater of the absurd. In an interview with The Japan Times about his new production, Betsuyaku discusses his own understanding of Godot.