The play does not hide its depth behind the waiting. The waiting is the depth.
Waiting for Godot is unusually vulnerable to being made more complicated than it is.
Two men wait. They talk, remember badly, quarrel, reconcile, consider leaving, contemplate suicide, encounter other people, receive information, and wait again. The second act partially repeats the first while changing enough of its elements to make repetition itself palpable.
That architecture is extraordinarily rich. But richness of pattern is not the same thing as representational mediation.
The temptation is to turn the relation between the two acts into a kind of model: Act I establishes a structure through which Act II must subsequently be interpreted. Repetition, variation, failed memory and recurrence then begin to look like an additional representational system sitting between the audience and the events.
TORC rejects that move.
Nothing has actually begun representing the events to us as an intermediary structure. The relations between Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, Godot, memory, expectation and time remain the represented reality of the play itself. Act II's relation to Act I is another relation within that reality.
This matters because otherwise almost any sufficiently organized narrative would become M2. Foreshadowing, parallel scenes, recurring motifs, contrasts and remembered events would all qualify as models merely because later material depends cognitively upon earlier material.
They don't.
Godot demonstrates how far direct relational cognition can go.
Its waiting does not need to stand for something else before it becomes cognitively powerful. Waiting itself reorganizes intention. Memory becomes unstable because nothing supplies enough change to anchor it. Decisions lose force because action repeatedly fails to become consequential. Hierarchies appear, deteriorate and recur. Time passes while resisting the ordinary evidence by which passing time becomes meaningful.
The result is not conceptual poverty. It is an unusually high-magnitude M1 artifact.
Its standout dimension is Integrative Compression. A tiny dramatic vocabulary—waiting, leaving, returning, remembering, forgetting—carries an enormous amount of relational information without requiring an explicit explanatory system.