The work of the charismatic Irish playwright and novelist, Samuel Beckett, has stirred up a great deal of debate, particularly from 1947 to 1952 when the Molloy trilogy and Waiting for Godot were first published.
There is an abundance of literature that tries to pin down the meaning of Beckett's oeuvre, a task made complicated because he was tackling themes about meaninglessness, drawing upon terms like existentialism, absurdity and determinism. The basic idea behind these theories is that the world is neither designed nor predictable, but irrational and lacking meaning. What is known is what is taken from experience.
No doubt is attached to the importance of Beckett's work: a Nobel laureateship and the choice of Waiting for Godot as the best play of the last century are honors that run contrary to any concept of meaningless. Waiting for Godot itself has outgrown attempts at definition by literary analysis or rigid pigeonholing.
Beckett may have been not so much interested in academic controversy, but more in the Irish delight in the use of language and its refinement, serious yet playful at the same time.
In this way, he related to his mentor, James Joyce, and Finnegan's Wake's notions of circularity: not unknown in Eastern thought.
So here in the spotlight was Dublin's highly esteemed Gate Theatre in Beijing in 2004, staging this complex, difficult and occasionally incomprehensible drama to a pretty full house with a mix of Chinese and foreign onlookers.
The set, designed by Louis le Brocquy, is stark and simple, dominated by a spindly tree bare in the first act, in the second sprouting three leaves. There is a rock and occasionally a pair of boots, set against a burnished copper backdrop. The set is speared by a brilliant full moon as it darkens at the end of each act.
The ensuing performance -- a version true to the playwright's intentions, married to sublime technique and skill -- was one that needed a dictionary of superlatives to praise adequately. Seldom in a theatre-going career does a cast scale such heights.
Part of that was the fluidity springing from the fact that the actors have been touring this production for a while and their interplay and timing through familiarity has become finely honed and attuned.
From there the players' evident empathy enables the production to operate at a higher level than usual.
The temptation is to write ever. Particular instances such as Lucky's harangue in the first act, and Pozzo's variation on the same theme in the second, lifted the show from excellent to "a once in a lifetime" experience. It was sheer theatrical magic.
In productions of Waiting for Godot the central thrust often falls on Vladimir and Estragon -- Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy in this play -- but here the spread of action was more even. Deliberately.
That is not to take anything away from McGovern's and Murphy's performances. Their repartee -- spanning clowning, quarreling, philosophizing and thoughts of suicide -- was distinguished by enunciation and projection heard clearly throughout the theatre; alternately fast, furious, frightening and funny.
They even functioned well on the non-verbal level: a surreal incident featuring an extended interchange of bowler hats was an example.
The dialogue, also, in the hands of these masters, constantly undercut itself, yet soared: "I suppose we blathered about nothing in particular," one of them said.
Still they and Alan Stanford's portrayal of a fruity Pozzo and Conor Lovett's paradoxical Lucky, conveyed not only the essence of Waiting for Godot, but also a manifest enjoyment in their own art, delivered with a rare rapport and precision, give or take a few textual liberties.
Rather than the play's conventional immediate post-World War II reading of the Pozzo-Lucky thread as representative of French-German relations, this Irish view delivered several solid swipes at England's colonial mentality.
In just over two hours this cast presented its audience with a definitive version of Godot and achieved a history of dramatic development as well.
Often effort falls flat through over-contrivance. Here it culminated in triumph.
Stand up and take another bow, gentlemen.
(China Daily May 17, 2004)
