![]() ![]() Ronald Pickup, who worked with Beckett in the 1970s ("it was like meeting Mandela or Gandhi"), recalls: "One of the great discoveries I had working with him was his huge sense of rhythm. If it is like anything, Godot is a piece of music, reaching beyond the literal. When plays and books go off like fruit, the soft bits go first. It's one of the few plays that really stand the test of time because there's just nothing spare in it. Certainly it doesn't need to gain strength from its time and place it has its own strength. And then of course, there's the writing and the humour. Plays which are designed to be a metaphor for particular correlatives have, I imagine, a very short lifespan. It's not the case that the true subject matter is in the metaphor. The true subject matter of Waiting for Godot is that it's about two tramps waiting for somebody. Sir Tom Stoppard, who first saw it in Bristol in the late 1950s, says: "The play is a universal metaphor precisely because it wasn't designed as being a metaphor for anything in particular. Who, or what, is Godot? Whatever you want it to be. But Beckett is taut and unyielding, his art abstract, his conclusion opaque. Even a great work such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible operates on two discernible levels: the literal story of the Salem witch trials, and the metaphorical narrative of McCarthyism. Like Shakespeare, Godot is a receptacle into which audiences can pour their preoccupations. It might have been about Sarajevo, but it is about all the other places, too. "In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art." She replied that not everyone, even in a war zone, craves popcorn escapism. She said simply: "Beckett's play, written over 40 years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo." There were objections that its world view was too pessimistic for people already in despair. Susan Sontag's production in a Sarajevo under siege in 1993 was dubbed "Waiting for Clinton". Productions in California's San Quentin prison and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina captured a restless present and yearning for renewal. An all-black Godot in South Africa implied a wait for the end of apartheid. Landmark productions of the play in the past half century have touched a nerve, or been designed as a catalyst for change, in troubled societies all over the world. It teaches you in a very gentle, intelligent way and I think it's very relevant today." ![]() It's written so subtly that its lessons are almost biblical. It doesn't lecture you, it's not polemic, it's not coarse. ![]() "This play speaks about what it is to be human at the most animal and spiritual level, so subtly that it's like a big beautiful poem or piece of music. When you have to rearrange your outside life - people worrying about their lack of money and all those kinds of things - it can't not have an effect on your inside life. The ground is shifting - for some dramatically, for others subtly - underneath our feet. "It's perfect timing to do it here because many individuals are affected by what's happening in the world with economics. "It speaks to us in extremis," says Sean Mathias, director of the new UK production. There is no drama more stripped down and essential than Godot, whose mysteries Beckett refused to elucidate beyond "the laughter and the tears". It is a moment for introspection and stripping down to bare essentials. Consumerism is on the retreat, and the acquisition of material objects is a dead end. Where there was certainty, there is now doubt and angst. Another towering human structure, capitalism, is trembling at the foundations. "The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." But it is also funny and poetic, and reveals humanity's talents for stoicism, companionship and keeping going. As a modernist existential meditation it can at first appear bleak: "They give birth astride of a grave," says Pozzo. Waiting for Godot seems to have a unique resonance during times of social and political crisis. Man on Wire, the Oscar-winning documentary about Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between New York's Twin Towers in 1974, has been described as the most powerful 9/11 film yet made, precisely because it does not mention 9/11. But often the most eloquent response is the most indirect. ![]() Does theatre have a purpose when the world's financial system is in downturn, or rather recession, or rather depression? There may be a play to come that will dissect the avarice, incompetence and structural causes of the malaise. ![]()
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