OCTOBER 2020 | FOR ONCE | WAITING FOR GODOT

A country road. A tree. The scene, as ordinary as it is iconic, could be located anywhere in the world. Here, at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in downtown Johannesburg, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot becomes firmly located in South Africa.

Directed by The Centre’s animateur Phala Ookeditse Phala, with dramaturgy by writer, academic, and long-time collaborator of The Centre Jane Taylor, Waiting for Godot served as The Centre’s first physical performance before a live audience since the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Tony Bonani Miyambo as Estragon (Gogo), Billy Langa as Vladimir (Didi), Jemma Kahn as Lucky and Boy, and Stefania Du Toit as Pozzo make up the complex, entangled, and absurd characters of Waiting for Godot in a way that sees the performers embodying the physicality and the text of the play in equal measure. With virtual readings of the script having started nearly five months ahead of the staging of the play, the director, dramaturg, and performers each had a significant amount of time to sit with the text, imagining how its characters would exist in the world prior to physical rehearsals.

It is this familiarity and embodiment of the characters in Waiting for Godot that allows the cast to, over the course of the two-hour iteration of the play, delve into the complex and endlessly fascinating ideas of mutual bondage, dependency, extraction, reliance and more that exist in the relationships between the characters. Miyambo and Langa engage with the characters of Gogo and Didi in a way that serves as both a meditation on fallibility and a testament to the act of relentlessly clawing one’s way out of a condition. Similarly, Du Toit and Khan as Pozzo and Lucky offer a compelling look at exploitative and cruel relationships and servitudes in Act 1, and the impermanence and precarity of power in Act 2.

Having two women performers assume the conventionally male characters of Pozzo and Lucky also allows for a rich study of what Taylor described during an ‘In Conversation’ event ahead of the performance as being “Beckett’s awareness of the asymmetries inside power and gender.” The ability for Gogo and Didi to play with language, interpretation, and pronunciation also provides an opportunity for a brand of absurdist humour that’s equally at home in Beckett’s script as it is on a South African stage.

Like so many of Beckett’s preoccupations, the act of relentlessly raging (or flailing) against a current, global condition, finds strong resonance with our contemporary times.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the act of waiting – literal, metaphysical, and otherwise – that resonates most powerfully in this performance. 2020, the year of waiting. Waiting for sickness, waiting for health, waiting for healing, or death, or an accessible cure. There was the waiting to work, the waiting to perform, waiting for the theatres and galleries and concert halls to open their doors so we could watch and learn and dance again. In between all of this waiting, there was the universal refrain: Nothing to be done.

Finally, it is also in the physical viewing of this iteration of Waiting for Godot that one engages with the act of waiting. The decision by Phala and Taylor to stage a two-hour performance without an interval was an intentional one. So, as Gogo and Didi go about their days spent waiting for Godot, the audience is right there with them, sitting in the same sand, in the presence of the same tree, and waiting.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

IN CONVERSATION | IN REHEARSAL WITH GODOT | THE DRAMATURG IN CONVERSATION WITH THE DIRECTOR AND CAST

Ahead of the 2020 performance of Waiting for Godot at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, two ‘In Conversation’ events were initiated as part of The Centre’s SO Academy in order to further explore the complexities of thinking and feeling that constitute the world of Samuel Beckett’s significant play in a contemporary South African context.

This first ‘In Conversation’, titled ‘In Rehearsal with Godot’ takes place at The Centre on the evening of 23 October 2020 and sees writer, artist and academic Jane Taylor, who serves as dramaturg for the work, in conversation with The Centre’s animateur and director of the play, Phala Ookeditse Phala as well as the cast which features the renowned talents of Tony Bonani Miyambo as Estragon (Gogo), Billy Edward Langa as Vladimir (Didi), Jemma Kahn as Lucky and Boy, and Stefania Du Toit as Pozzo.

Using the world between the words as a starting point, Taylor and Phala unpack the initial need to make sense of the space in which the play would be produced, and how set became a vital starting point. How the incidental nature of an immovable wooden beam serving as structural support in The Centre space provided the answer, ultimately becoming one of the first characters in this iteration of the play – the tree.

A short showing by the cast provides an opportunity for audiences to observe the embodiment of the characters, if only briefly, and acts as a springboard for rich discussion around the pre-history of the play, the physical and psychological act of waiting in contemporary times, and the ingraining of habit, text, and character in the body. The cast reflects on the circumstantial luxury of being able to sit with a text for an extended period, picking the script apart through countless zoom rehearsals and having time to imagine how their characters would exist in the world, before being able to physically meet and begin work on the play.

Ending off the conversation is an extended discussion on the challenges and joys of exploring the central question, circumstance, or phrase of ‘nothing to be done’ as well as how notions of language, play, identity, and intimacy became vital tools in a journey of embodiment that begins with freedom.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

IN CONVERSATION | SEARCHING FOR GODOT, RESEARCHING BECKETT

This second ‘In Conversation’, titled ‘Searching for Godot, Researching Beckett’ takes place at The Centre on the evening of 29 October 2020 and sees writer, artist and academic Jane Taylor, who serves as dramaturg for the work, in conversation with animateur for The Centre, and director of the play, Phala Ookeditse Phala.

While the first ‘In Conversation’ explored the embodiment of the characters in the play, this discussion sees Taylor and Phala working through the text itself, drawing out and pursuing various intertextual skeins of thought from Beckett’s own political history in order to further locate the play in a contemporary global and South African context. Over the course of an evening, the two engage in searching Beckett’s “fearless inventory of exploring and being the ‘other’ in making the story, and revealing the complexities of thinking and feeling that constitute the world of the play.”

Performative fragments from the cast (Tony Miyambo as Estragon/Gogo, Billy Langa as Vladimir/Didi, Jemma Kahn as Lucky and Boy, and Stefania Du Toit as Pozzo) also provide a brief bit of insight into the way that these themes and complexities take shape in the text. The mutual bondages that characterise the relationships between these characters are unpacked and contextualised in relation to the central questions and explorations in Beckett’s work, as is his research into imperial oppression, the post-war condition, and the asymmetries inside power and gender.

Beckett’s interests in, and considerations of, Africa and South Africa are touched on, helping to further locate the work of the playwright, and make sense of the staging of Waiting for Godot on the African continent, further demonstrating how the text finds a South African locality. Finally, a discussion on the motivations and functions of absurdism in the text explores meditations on fallibility, and the political unconsciousness in Beckett’s characters.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

THINK, PIG!

In response to the pandemic and its threat to performance arts, the idea to work with Waiting for Godot as a text and a script came from long time collaborator of William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Jane Taylor, a writer, academic, and playwright. Alongside the making and staging of Waiting for Godot, Taylor teamed up with actor, artist, writer and director Jemma Kahn to create a series of 7 miniature films from Lucky’s monologue from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The series was featured in The Long Minute project curated over the course of 2020 by artist and founding animateur for the Centre Bronwyn Lace. Here the films are edited together.

In Taylor’s words: “‘Think, Pig!’ is the outrageous command from the overlord Pozzo, to his serf, Lucky. This imperative gives rise to a disinhibition of Lucky, who is overwhelmed by a wild linguistic outpouring, as if this is thinking.

The following 7 minutes recreates the scenes of Lucky’s thought. Each minute follows its own internal logic but is related to the whole. Lucky returns again and again to certain obsessions. There are enigmas, such “Cunard”, and “Connemara”, as well as symbols with emotional meaning: the skull; but also the seasons, and games such as tennis, flying, gliding, dying. What to make of Beckett’s purposes? We resolved to locate, in the text, a distinct dynamic and psychological dramatic beat for each film, as well as the longer arc of the speech. The film suggests the processes of our making, and the research into Beckett’s writing.”

Minute Two:

Finding Her Lucky. Commanded to “Think,” Pozzo’s serf, Lucky, explodes with speech fragments which can (more or less) carry meaning. Traditionally played by a male actor, Lucky here is played by a female. “Finding” suggests the exploration of role; at the same time, Jemma Kahn and I are positionally “lucky,” under lockdown, to have a substantial play to explore, both in film and in anticipation of the opening of theatres.

The sadomasochism of the relations in Godot stage Beckett’s alienation from a hypothetical God who seems oblivious to suffering (‘from the heights of divine apathia”). Lucky is bound to Pozzo by rope; while Gogo and Didi are tied to one another through sentiment or habit. They note in their dialogue that they are NOT tied.

Violence against women is one of several catastrophes in South Africa, and we allude to this in the casting of the piece. Beckett invokes the violence of intellectual traditions (“Acacacacademy”) and pseudo-science (“Anthropopopometry”).

Minute Three:

Norbert Elias’s study, The Civilizing Process, provides an overview of Western histories of bodily regulation that generate the mysterious being, “man”. Lucky’s speech similarly gives a survey of the governing of self that, if successful, passes persons from helpless infancy on to feeble dotage through any number of disciplinary rule-governed practices (whether characterised as work or as play). The economy of the self is determined by two drives, “alimentation” and “defecation”: eating and expelling. Many of the crises of the modern self arise largely because we have become obsessed with our inability to regulate this economy satisfactorily. We hoard.

Vladimir and Estragon, the characters at the centre of Godot, exist inside a meagre economy, barely adequate to sustain life, yet not so mean as to extinguish either play and work. This is part of the wonder of their “untied” bond to one another. They are bound by affection. Lucky and Pozzo are bound by both rope and whip.

Minute Four:

Beckett’s plays are about theatre as much as about the world. His short play Catastrophe recreates a scene between Director and Assistant Director who critique an actor: the AD suggests, “What if I were to raise the head?” The Director responds ”Where do you think we are? In Patagonia?”

In Film Three Lucky, humiliated, wrestles to hold onto words as well as performance, while being interrogated by a searchlight as a refugee or prisoner might be. Lucky’s speech is a work of virtuoso mnemonics as the garbled words are almost impossible to hold onto. The actor, then, is subjugated, as Beckett brings master/slave relations into the theatre.

Film Four invokes Connemara, an Irish landscape of legendary beauty; but Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist who exposed violations in the Congo and South America, likened the abuse of the enslaved indigenous Putamayo, by British rubber planters, to the plight of destitute Irish Connemara peasants robbed of their land by England.

Minute Five:

Speech acts. Here, shards of language have the material force of concrete poetry.

Ambiguities of aural and visual meaning generate a momentary nausea as we try to make sense of: “buy the seas buy the rivers.” Beckett’s “by the seas by the rivers” inhabits the geographies of space, but the graphic substitution from “by” to “buy” compels us into an ecological reading of the subsequent sentence fragment “running water running fire the air is the same.”

Beckett was interpreter and store keeper in the Irish hospital at St-Lô in France after it was bombed to smithereens by Allied forces at the end of WWII. His essay, “The Capital of the Ruins” is a devastating account of destitution, the core theme in Godot.

Yet there are glimpses of Lucky amid the textual fragments: as observer, as commentator, as abject subject. Sisyphus is invoked, perpetually clambering uphill. Ironically Lucky carries in his mouth the instrument of his abjection: the whip.

Minute Six:

When Lucky arrives onstage carrying Pozzo’s possessions, he collapses from fatigue and falls asleep in front of us. This is an event not much marked in many performances, except as comic exuberance. Pozzo’s contemptuous “Every time he drops he falls asleep” reminds us of the immoral economy of slavery, where sleep is “stolen” from the master. (Spike Lee’s blackface performer in his Bamboozled is named “Sleep ‘n Eat” a bitter evocation of the extractive abuse of the human being in bondage.)

Here Lucky subsides into a standing-sleep, and we hear the fugitive soul through the perpetual rasping breath under the image. Sleep takes us into Lucky, and the wretched intimacy of the scene allows us to experience the dark thoughts and bereft tragedy of the beast of burden. What the exploration into an inner universe necessarily reveals is “the skull”; we are immediately with Hamlet gazing upon Yorick, or, in Catholic iconography, at the foot of the Cross, at Golgotha.

Minute Seven:

In the project of Finding Her Lucky we explored the text of Godot for traces of Lucky’s sensibility. What gives rise, we asked, to the extraordinary rhetorical display prompted by Pozzo’s command, “Think, pig!”

Lucky has two modes of articulation, arising on command from Pozzo. One is the imperative to think. The other is to dance. This seemingly Cartesian subject can summon up virtuoso mental and physical activities.

Before the performance of “thinking” that is the subject of these films, Lucky dances for Gogo and Didi. There is little evidence of what such a dance of servitude might look like, but we are informed that Lucky was once a fine dancer, with a suite of different performances. Now, however, the dance has resolved itself down to an interpretation of his plight. As Pozzo tells us, the dance is called “The Net”.

Film Seven, then, is something of a Prequel to the series.

– Jane Taylor

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