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Anthony Steyning |
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Literary Critique WAITING FOR BECKETT (Subtitle: Any Godot Will Do) by Anthony Steyning |
| Tell him that you saw us… Didi pleads with the boy somewhere in the middle, a loaded line that gets reiterated towards the end in Waiting for Godot. I first saw the play some twenty years after it premiered in Paris: I didn't understand it at all. Later on, I bought a paper-back copy of the work at W.H. Smith in Montreal, reading the play over and over again, still not understanding a bloody word. I was in my late twenties then, and mightily pissed off with myself for not fathoming a famous piece of work, praised by critics the world over, inquiring timidly about its meaning among Irish friends, all literate theatre buffs, who spewed out near mystical explanations that also went over my head. Certainly the work is noble, tender, a stone-face Buster Keaton burlesque show, containing great lines like Thank you for your society, and something or other Gives us the feeling that we exist…which I now know to be a common French colloquialism.
Pretty stuff, all of it, and not as such beyond my reach, but still, at the time I continued miserably not getting the whole of it. I remember people like Eric Bentley calling Beckett's Godot a masterful creation, the quintessence of existentialism. And a Norman Mailer statement to the effect that Beckett had sexually(!) re-established Christianity. Despite those nonsensical contradictions I pretended I believed both of these chaps, just to be on the safe side. But as it turns out they were as flabbergasted as I was that a staged, moving, plotless tableau mesmerized, inventing those crazy descriptions of the work only to cover up their own pathetic befuddlement. Maybe someone'll sexually re-establish Christianity on stage tonight. Wanna come?
But now thirty years on, on a recent visit to Canada, and thanks to a PBS channel in my hotel room, during a broadcast celebrating the 50th anniversary of Godot, by Jove, I think I got it. Beckett demystified at last. And all because of Dublin's Gate Theatre production on film, produced not much more than three, perhaps four years earlier. Involving splendid actors who hadn't been born yet when the piece ran at the Babylon Theatre in Paris, yet able, would you believe it, to decipher this Godot enigma for me! Chapeau, dear Gate friends, chapeau dear Beckett, for in the end there's nothing here to be afraid of or intimidated by, it's a down-to-earth play using simple, splendidly rhythmic language, written by a down-to-earth man about down-to-earth pre-occupations crossing everyone's mind at one point. Packaged though the work is in an unusual way, presented with all the tedium and repetitiveness, deliberate or not, which happen to reflect real life. Though all of it within a bleakness that threw me off for so many years, like a scene from arid, outer space. A forbidding landscape, leading me to believe the play was about something else for if one thing is certain, it's that Beckett's story takes place on this planet, not another. And this world of ours, if anything, is crowded, lush, diverse, not barren, empty, cold. Except for Tierra del Fuego or Siberia perhaps.
And surely a caustic sense of forsakenness, of utter loneliness can be felt in a big city, surrounded by millions, as well I know having lived through moments like these more than once. It's a cruel experience, not pretty, so why not place Godot in the middle of an outdoor market, a football match, or a busy whorehouse---- it makes the feeling of loss, of disaffection 10 times more acute just as long as a deep sense of despair, of silent exasperation and alienation is left to prevail. By not doing this, Beckett and his acolytes led me astray for a long, long time.
Also, why that tree, Sam? Or why the redundant suggestion of hanging from one—this is clear by itself, innit? You didn't have to spell it out, laddie. And again, why the sparseness of it all? Can't we hang where it's crowded and moist? Or is the landscape you painted supposed to be the emptiness of existence? But how is that, if people like Vladimir and Estragon, delightful, confused derelicts, are so rich and warm? By themselves filling that void, effortlessly enabling us to believe in life; loving it, not hating or fearing it!
It's clear to me now that Beckett used a few themes that are not so mind-boggling after all: a) what are we doing here? immediately followed by b) we are abandoned! c) as if this isn't bad enough, some help themselves pass the time by brutalising others. And d) Lucky's soliloquy as a bonus point: massive use of words does not equate meaning and/or being. Four basic ingredients then, none of them particularly inaccessable or exclusive to high-brows.
In factual terms, when during an interview Beckett was asked if Godot is God, he replied: I have no idea! Surely he was kidding, or if not, deliberately coy and devious, a bit of a pastime with the Irish sometimes. Godot the play is not existential whatsoever, it doesn't celebrate existence for its own sake and on its own merit for one single moment. Also, there can be no 'waiting' without 'hope' and where there is 'hope' there can be no absurdity or existential denial... So I don't know who labelled the work as a cornerstone of the Theatre of the Absurd, but to me that notion itself is completely absurd as suffering from a sense of absurdity suggests an utter lack of hope. So as long as you're in the labelling business, may I suggest something in the order of Theatre of Abstract Yearning given its undeniably expressionistic and 'random' beauty? And abstract or not, what this play does is ache and despair for some sort of divine presence. In fact it questions the value of life without it, so that at its roots Waiting for Godot, though not perhaps in a conventional sense, is a deeply religious play, profoundly nostalgic not for Godot as such, for what's in a name, but for 'a' Godot, any Godot, any god, or, yes, God, as long as we are wanted, as long as we belong! A need for there to be some super force so there can be 'meaning' and by implication some sort of servitude, even though Beckett, understandably, and given much evident worldly misery, at the same time was rightly disillusioned with Godot, Him, him or 'it'. And all his Angst, yes, truly religious, because the last holy paradox: love of God or some god and at the same time hate of Him or him or 'it', is the living essence of the play. Whereby once more with feeling, there's nothing really 'absurd' or 'existential' about any of this, just the expression of frailty all too human.
And so Tell him that you saw us… is not a lament. It is not a rejection or even a charged sarcasm. It is a plea, a prayer, with a longing in it that makes everything else in the play doleful camouflage. And it's this camouflage that was the source of my not understanding the work. Tell him…. where Beckett through the boy implores God, some god, (who else, indeed, Sam?) to come, manifest and eventually explain Himself; and that's where it should have ended. Despite the actual last lines of the play saying Where shall we go? Let's go…. literally and figuratively leading nowhere, suggesting we're lost. Because here, for someone like me, isn't nowhere and thus the need to go elsewhere not especially imperative. Besides the fact that sitting around 'waiting' is inherently cruel, something for which I have little appetite.
Samuel Beckett, I think, while carefully admitting nothing, at the very least got a little lost in his own exasperations. It is why I was so confused, and delighted to have discovered that all the others, particularly those literary establishment Popes, then and presumably still now, had no frigging clue about the play or ever knew at the time what they were talking about. But thanks to this brilliant Gate production I have arrived at these conclusions scant weeks ago. (Or am I merely maturing at last, and none too soon…) Then again, there might be hope for me: Beckett was my age when he broke through, and still then not getting all of his beautiful stuff…. quite right. Or did he? Is 'waiting' a real option for so many? Well, for some perhaps but as for me, why don't we just live life first and let the ball drop where it must! Like waiting for a bus: if it turns out it got cancelled or doesn't even exist, just start walking, my good man. Now this is 'existential', in life absolutely nothing... 'absurd'.
Finally, as far as this remarkable, liberating production of The Gate Theatre itself is concerned, in the master/slave relationship twixt Pozzo and Lucky (as always with Beckett, dark humour in this very name, just like the breakfast sounding Hamm & Nagg in Endgame, or like Estragon here, nice name, fine herb, almost Greek, almost classic, almost Antigone, almost Sophocles, but surely codes telling us he didn't wish to be taken all that seriously), 'master' Pozzo speaks with a pronounced upper-class English accent, and 'slave' Lucky (!) in thick Irish brogue. Is The Gate Theater reminding us here of something? Re-asserting and magnifying victimhood and old slights on the cheap, or is this a small coincidence? The former being the case would be most regrettable, as surely universality was Beckett's aim, not stale, parochial beefs, dating back almost a century.
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21/02/03
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