Spot Escape – Weekend

In modern theater, the absurd is a full-fledged character, a noun, not an adjective, an object, not an ‘ism’. The theater of the absurd exists, but the music of the absurd, the painting of the absurd, and even the cinema of the absurd does not exist. Among all theatrical authors who have taken the absurd as their heroes, Samuel Beckett is still the most successful.

Text: Olga Fedyanina

The concept of absurdity in aesthetics is almost always synonymous with riddles, puzzles. Whether we are talking about a novel, a play or a film, you have a work in front of which those laws operate that do not operate outside of it and which from the outside look like the absence of laws. The audience finds itself in the position of Oedipus questioning the Sphinx – only the absurdist sphinxes, as a rule, are very talkative and thus mislead people. “Waiting for Godot”, the main text of the theater of the absurd, is arranged in a fundamentally different way. This is an anti-mystery play in which exactly what is meant is written and shown.

Vladimir: Well? Are we going?
Estragon: Let’s go!
Both don’t move.

Two men in an abandoned place are engaged in a dialogue, aimless and inexhaustible. They are waiting for a certain Godot, who must somehow correct their plight. For a while, two more join them – the master and his servant, and the first pushes the second around like a dog. Then another boy appears, saying that Godot will not come today, he will come tomorrow. Both characters freeze in anticipation. This ends the first act. The second proceeds in exactly the same way – and ends in the same way.

Written in 1949, published in 1952, staged in 1953, this play is still one of the most successful texts of modern times. If the art world had accurate statistics, then most likely it would be possible to write – the most successful. In 1969, the Nobel Committee formally awarded the entire body of Beckett’s literary work, but for those who made the decision, he was, firstly, the author of Godot, and secondly, everything else. Beckett was awarded “for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation” stated in the official explanation. Undoubtedly, this very “destitution”, polysemantic and untranslatable, as the main feature of the ongoing modernity, constitutes the literary and philosophical essence of the entire post-war Western culture. In this sense, Beckett has long been living in the same common space with a huge number of his like-minded people, followers, imitators and interpreters.

Much less obvious is the case with Godot as a text for the theatre. Regardless of what “Waiting for Godot” is for world literature, it remains a unique piece of theatrical pragmatics.

And this is its main difference from the whole huge, beautiful and lively tradition of the theater of the absurd – from Alfred Jarry to Heiner Müller, who created a whole canon of texts that are rightfully considered difficult on the stage, if not hopeless. Precisely because behind them, subtext, supertext, hypertext, is an unearthly logic. They are almost always written as if for a Martian theater, where living figures have the properties of mechanisms or bacteria, where the scenery must be cast from boiling metal, where the human body is interesting only insofar as it can be deconstructed – but what to do with a living and whole actor’s organism , this theater fundamentally does not know. To take another great absurdist text, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinos, as an example, the need to invent what a rhinoceros should look like on stage puts any theater on the verge of failure – and sends it to start looking for affordable ways to avoid this failure. An absurdist play does not go well with the classical theatrical box and all its stuffing – it is absurdist because it denies this box, fights with it, breaks it.

“Waiting for Godot” does not have this destructive energy at all. There is an energy of denial that excludes, first of all, all kinds of complication, manipulation of the volume of the imaginary and the implied.

When Beckett was asked if he meant that his characters are in a fruitless expectation of God, because the association “God = Godot” suggests itself, the author dryly replied: “If I meant God, then I would write – God.” He also said something else: “If I knew who Godot was, why would I write a play?” Refusal to solve the riddle provides a sense of airlessness, dialogue without gaps, behind which there is literally nothing. The atmosphere coincides with the plot – from both there is no way out in either direction. The place of non-being.

In this airlessness there is a lot of the most refined verbal and dramatic skill. Beckett shows a world completely doomed to repetition, to movement in a circle – while almost not a single sentence and not a single situation is repeated here. What was a statement in one scene becomes a question in the next. What was an insult becomes a request, what was a nightmare becomes a dream. Nothing happens, and this “nothing” is infinitely diverse, capable of generating endless conflicts.

But it is precisely the equality to oneself that makes this text an exception among absurdist texts, a theatrical hit for many decades.

“Waiting for Godot” is an airless play that can be placed in any air. Its great and still unique secret is that it can take place in absolutely any conditions. In the amateur theater and in the professional one, with a huge staging scope and with two chairs – or without them at all. With great actors and talking heads. It can be played as a charade at a party, at a children’s birthday party, on a giant stage, wherever you want, however you want. In a sense, it cannot “fail” at all, it always turns out and for everyone.

In this sense, the most “significant” production of “Waiting for Godot” took place in 1985 and was shown once. The Swedish actor and director Jon Jonson rehearsed the play with the inmates of the Kumla prison in order to, so to speak, artistic re-socialization. The premiere seemed so encouraging to the prison authorities that the “troupe” was sent on tour to Gothenburg. But before the start of the second show, four of the five contestants fled. The director had to go on stage himself and improvise a monologue about Beckett for two hours. Meanwhile, four fugitives went to Spain – to warm up a little and take a walk, in general to enjoy the southern warm life. A few days later, they themselves called the director from Spain, and after some short time they returned to Sweden and went to serve out their terms.

Beckett, having heard this story from Jonsong, is said to have laughed a lot.

---

Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram