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

CREDITS: