As they await their enigmatic patron, Godot, Estragon laments being beaten by nameless figures during the night, and Vladimir seeks to pass the time by stirring his companion into repartee. Each act begins with the pair reunited after spending the night apart. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait on the side of a country road. Vivian Mercier, the critic for the Irish Times, dubbed it “a play in which nothing happens, twice.” His ramblings may be loosely based around the theories of the Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley.Samuel Beckett originally subtitled his 1953 play Waiting for Godot “a tragicomedy in two acts”. Within the gibberish Lucky makes comments on the arbitrary nature of God, man's tendency to pine and fade away, and towards the end, the decaying state of the earth. The monologue is long, rambling word salad, and does not have any apparent end it is only stopped when Vladimir takes the hat back. He asks them to give him his hat: when Lucky wears his hat, he is capable of thinking. The monologue is prompted by Pozzo when the tramps ask him to make Lucky 'think'. Lucky is most famous for his speech in Act I. Pozzo mourns this, despite the fact that it was he who silenced Lucky in the first act. He philosophises, like Vladimir, and is integral to Pozzo's survival, especially in the second act. Read this way, Pozzo and Lucky are simply an extreme form of the relationship between Estragon and Vladimir (the hapless impulsive and the intellect who protects him). he represents one part of a larger, whole character, whose other half is represented by Pozzo). Lucky is often compared to Vladimir (just as Pozzo is compared to Estragon) as being the intellectual, left-brained part of his character duo (i.e. Beckett asserted, however, that he is lucky because he has 'no expectations'. Pozzo tells him what to do, he does it, and is therefore lucky because his actions are determined absolutely. Some have marked him as 'lucky' because he is 'lucky in the context of the play.' He does not have to search for things to occupy his time, which is a major pastime of the other characters. Lucky's place in Waiting for Godot has been heavily debated.

His props include a picnic basket, a coat, and a suitcase full of sand. When he is not serving Pozzo, he usually stands in one spot drooling, or sleeping if he stands there long enough. He is 'tied' (a favourite theme in Godot) to Pozzo by a ridiculously long rope in the first act, and then a similarly ridiculous short rope in the second act. Lucky suffers at the hands of Pozzo willingly and without hesitation. Lucky is unique in a play where most of the characters talk incessantly: he only utters two sentences, one of which is more than seven hundred words long (the monologue). Lucky is a character from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Mehdi Bajestani, as Lucky, (from a production by Naqshineh Theatre).

Samuel beckett play waiting for godot