'Waiting for Godot' at Annenberg

'In the meantime...nothing happens':
Reverence (maybe too much) for Beckett

ROBERT ZALLER

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is as much the defining play of the 20th Century as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was of the 19th. With its improbable combination of existential angst and vaudeville farce, it redefined our notion of tragic experience. More than 50 years after its debut, Godot has survived the true test of a classic: it can still seem new.

Waiting for Godot was, of course, originally En attendant Godot, the French play that Beckett wrote and then himself translated into English. This fact is significant because it reminds us of the elements of traditional French theater in it, particularly the static stagecraft of Corneille. “Nothing happens,” as Estragon (Gogo), the earthier of Beckett’s two tramps, reminds his sidekick Vladimir (Didi) more than once: that is, two figures on a heath beside a single bare tree notionally wait for a mysterious savior who never arrives but sends a messenger each day to assure them that he will.

Futile wanderlust

It is not, though, very clear what a “day” is (the illusion of time is a critical subtext of the play), nor whether the place where the tramps are is the same, which makes the very notion of “waiting” problematic. We are reminded of the Biblical injunction that neither the time nor the place of judgment may be known, although it is equally unclear that judgment is what Gogo and Didi await.

Movement and stasis is, indeed, another vital element in the play, for the restless Gogo, whose futile wanderlust is symbolized in shoes that pinch and feet that stink, wanders without object and returns beaten, while Didi, who asks only to be beheld, remains rooted so that he may be seen— it is he, really, who waits for Godot, while Didi waits only for him. Both tramps know they have only each other; and both, like any long-suffering couple, are consumed with boredom by that very fact.

Their travesty roles are played by Pozzo and Lucky, the master and menial who provide the play’s only diversion (and its most unnerving transformation). Humankind still goes by twos in Waiting for Godot as in its successor play, Endgame, and so drama is still possible, though deliberately withheld. The later Beckett is essentially a monologuist whose theme is the actual impossibility of drama (meaning, that all dramatic representation is necessarily cliché). But these early plays are the ones that hold the stage, because audiences still prefer to see futility enacted rather than merely supposed.

The Gate Theatre’s credentials

The Gate Theatre is an Irish institution, and its interpretation of Godot might be considered authoritative— it first staged the work 50 years ago— if any such interpretation were possible. It is not, just as no Hamlet can ever be definitive. The veteran actors Johnny Murphy and Barry McGovern are Gogo and Didi, respectively, but though each performer has his points, a certain understatement keeps the characters from fully coming to life and therefore truly engaging each other. No doubt this reflects the intentions of German director Walter D. Ausmus, who worked with Beckett himself; on the other hand, however, Alan Stanford’s stentorian, almost Shakespearean Pozzo is so vivid a contrast to them that we seem to be seeing, if not two separate plays, certainly two dramatic styles.

It is understandable that the tramps themselves should welcome Pozzo and Lucky (Stephen Brennan, a superb physical actor though not quite up to his pandemonic monologue) as a diversion, but less desirable that the audience should do so too. All in all, this is a worthy production by a company with Beckett in its bones, but by the same token perhaps a slightly too reverential one; there are, certainly, moments of humor and pathos, but one wants, at this point in the play’s history, something more raw and spontaneous. There is a moment in the second act where the great darkness that hangs over the play nearly takes over the stage, but it does not quite come off, and one senses Alan Stanford going over the top in the birth-astride-a-grave speech in an effort to force the necessary brooding energy.

One absolutely right note

This production played only through October 15th at the refurbished Zellerbach Theatre in Penn’s Annenberg Center before moving on with its American tour. If it is not the best Godot one could wish, it may well be the best Philadelphia is likely to have for awhile. And considering the ghastly and misbegotten productions most seasoned theatergoers are likely to have encountered, that is saying something.

I would be remiss in failing to mention young Devin O’Shea-Farren’s boy messenger. It is the one absolutely right note in the show, as clear as a bell chime. Beckett perhaps meant the boy to be redemptive; he is, after all, the only sign of Godot we have. He certainly is in this production.