Godot returns to Edmonton stage
Beckett’s enigmatic masterwork returns in Wishbone production
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”
There’s an impasse for you — and a built-in disclaimer. It’s Estragon’s famous lament to his fellow vagabond in Act I of Waiting For Godot. And it gets to the crux of the matter. Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic masterwork, the single most influential, resonant play of the 20th century, thumbs its nose at every convention of the theatre en route to joining our most powerful myths about the human condition. It opens Thursday in a Wishbone Theatre production directed by Chris Bullough.
The play, “a mystery wrapped in an enigma” as one of its early commentators described it, saw its first paying public in a little Paris Left Bank theatre in 1953. And it’s bewildered, provoked, seduced, teased, moved, and haunted the world ever since. On the play’s 1955 opening night in London, Estragon’s line elicited an immediate “hear hear!” from one enraged theatregoer, recalls director Peter Hall, in his published diaries.
The play’s 1956 American debut was at the Coconut Grove in Miami, billed as “the laugh sensation of two continents.” The New York Times’ Walter Kerr wondered pointedly, “Antarctica and which other?”
The only box office queue was to return tickets.
“A country road. A tree. Evening.” Even the stage directions have resonated for more than half a century. After that, and an opening line that’s nothing if not quixotic — “nothing to be done” — we meet two tramps who wait, and wait, and wait some more for a mysterious authority figure to show up and give meaning to … waiting. The existential vaudevillians amuse themselves by bickering, singing, juggling, play-acting, and making gallows jokes (and gallows, for that matter) to pass the time. But then, as one of them points out, it would have passed anyway.
As the Irish critic Vivien Mercier memorably noted, Godot is a remarkable theatrical achievement: “Nothing happens. Twice.”
Who is this Godot? Why do the tramps keep waiting for him, even though he keeps standing them up? Why are we drawn to their mystification? You could wait and wait for a definitive explanation. The Freudians have had a go; so have the Jungians, the behaviourists, the existentialists, the absurd- ists, the symbolists, the ethicists…. Christians are naturally attracted by a mystery figure named Godot, though the name doesn’t conjure that way in the original French.
The playwright is no help. “I know no more about the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them,” Beckett wrote. “Them and Me, we’re quits.”
And yet, the stalemate of the bowler-hatted pair, stalled by their own hunger for meaning, which always eludes them, continues to fascinate us. As the actor Simon Callow has pointed out, we just have to see the opening image — “a tramp in his bowler, tugging at his boots, with a solitary tree behind him” — to be stirred. He and his comrade are us.
“There’s an unnameable something about Waiting For Godot,” says Bullough. “Its history weighs heavy on it; it’s been intellectualized to death. But it is a comedy. Beckett is a playwright, not (some) supercerebral existentialist philosopher. He’s human. Of this world.”
Vladimir and Estragon, he thinks, “are looking for someone else to solve their problems, instead of looking within. What the hell is going on? they wonder. You’ve got to look inside yourself if you want to be happy, not God, not some powerful man. Otherwise you’ll be waiting....”
“As actors you want everything to make sense,” Bullough muses. “But life doesn’t make sense, Beckett says. We want it to. But it doesn’t.” Indeed,
Godot’s production history includes more comedians and clowns — Bert Lahr, Max Wall, Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, Steve Martin, Robin Williams among them — than classical actors.
Michael Peng, the actor-director who presides over Wishbone along with Bullough, is the designer in charge of the country road, the tree, and evening. Waiting For Godot “is about meaning and existence, essentially. And in a post-9/11 world, well, the sense of trying to make sense of a world where things don’t make sense … .” Those are questions that don’t shatter in the light of a new day.
“Their essential plight is still our plight,” says Peng. “Vladimir and Estragon have to live without certainty. … They just want something they can stand on. And the reference points are harder and harder to find.
“And there’s humour in it! We’re such a resilient species. And it’s smart, self-deprecating humour,” he says. “Canadian maybe?”
Peng tried to engage a potential theatregoer heading from the Arts Barns to her parking space the other day. “You should come see our show,” he pitched her. “I hate that play!” she declared emphatically and walked away.
Poor Peng; nothing to be done. Chances are she hasn’t seen it, though. Famous as it is, it’s not as if Waiting For Godot is mounted every other week. Wishbone’s is the first time in 34 years Vladimir and Estragon have waited for Godot on a professional Edmonton stage since the 1978 Theatre 3 production (Tom Wood played Estragon).
“It’s a monster!” Bullough declares of a play that leaves its characters stranded. “So many layers! You stare into rabbit hole, and there are other worlds in there.”