Gordon's first play borrows the absurdist form made infamous by such playwrights as Samuel Beckett (of whom he freely admits he is parodying). Written as an escape from writer's block, as was Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Gordon's work features two men sitting at a table in an isolated room without any means of escape attempting to break the tedium of their allocated task, i.e. to mind an enourmous boulder that the audience cannot see.

"I wrote it and just forgot about it for a long time," he says, "but then i found it one day and once i started reading i just couldn't stop. I read it and re-read it and i realised the structure was pretty tight and i just liked watching these two guys go back and forth in this idiotic round-robin of logic (or even anti-logic)."

While No Titles, Please is an unashamed Beckett parody, the world of the piece echos Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in which faceless political concerns operate with omnipotent efficiency, manipulating all involved, creating the absurdist premise of two men minding a completely useless stone - the logistics of which are questioned in the play's finale.

© 2004 R. W. Gordon. All rights reserved.