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:

PERFORMERS | Tony Bonani Miyambo, Billy Edward Langa, Jemma Kahn & Stefania Du Toit
DIRECTOR | Phala O. Phala
DRAMATURG | Prof. Jane Taylor
SET & COSTUME DESIGNER | Nthabiseng Malaka
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Kutlwano Makgalemele
EDITOR | Noah Cohen