Devon, Gwen Kingston, Charlotte McIvor, Cari Wieland and Samanta Cubias
outside of Joyce Tower
Although Waiting for Godot is often referred to as a play in which nothing happens twice, I contend that this is a play in which many things happen, but none of which have any ultimate consequences. Pozzo goes blind, the Boy comes and delivers Godot’s message, Lucky “thinks,” and Estragon hurts his foot; but the characters’ situation never changes. The only arguably “permanent” or consequential change that occurs is in Vladimir’s realization and acceptance of his cyclical, existential existence, and his ultimate acceptance of the fact that Godot will never come, but that he must wait for him anyway. Thus, the actor’s duty when inhabiting a world in which none of his actions have any real bearing, is to find a way in which he can maintain an intense level of focus on his fellow players, and commit himself fully to living “in the moment.” Furthermore, it is the actor’s job to be very aware of the energy, rhythm and pacing of each moment-- for as soon as a scene begins to drag the actors risk losing the audience to boredom and the temptation of text-messaging. Boredom on the character’s part, too, must be carefully handled by the actor; as boredom is truly the obstacle that the characters are constantly working against, and to play “boredom” spells death for the play’s momentum and ultimate impact.
Consistency of mental and emotional “presence” on stage is, of course, the goal of every actor; but an actor’s presence in any play with a more traditional, linear plot structure is always coupled with an internal awareness or sense of “the past,” and how past events in the play are affecting their character’s feelings, thoughts, etc. An actor cast in Waiting for Godot, however, need not concern himself so much with this awareness of the past, for what happens before is only going to happen again (and it is likely that his character won’t remember what happened anyway.) It follows, then, that the actor’s focus on the immediate problem in any given beat of the play be coupled with, first, a clear understanding of his relationship to his scene partner, and second (to quote Lura Dolas,) a “ruthless pursuit of objective.” The actor must know what his character wants and needs from the other character(s) from moment to moment, because the other characters are, quite literally, all that he has to relate to in Beckett’s desolate world. It is only through the audience’s emotional investment in the character’s relationships that they are able to sit in a chair for two hours watching a play in which nothing happens and still be thoroughly entertained. It is therefore the job of the actor to keep the audience engaged through a ruthless pursuit of objective, maintaining a constant connection with his fellow actors, and to do it all at a watchable pace.
Relationships seem to be the main concern of Barry McGovern and Jimmy Murphy in their approach to their filmed version of Godot. With a script that could easily be read as a mind-numbing series of empty non-sequiturs, McGovern and Murphy work to endow even the most absurd exchanges between characters with meaning, weight, a sense of immediate consequence, and a justifiable link to the internal logic of the play. Even when their characters are talking in circles, McGovern and Murphy always seek to play their text with the intent, however ultimately hopeless, to come to some kind of conclusion or to find an answer. Watching these two actors work, it seems that they never let an opportunity for a connection between the characters pass; and it is this dedication to creating the sense of a realistic, genuine conversation that makes their performance so compelling. It allows us as audience members to relate to Didi and Gogo as human beings.
Beyond facilitating an authentic human connection between performer and audience, McGovern and Murphy’s Irish nationality also, intentionally or not, creates a space for a more specific socio-political interpretation of Beckett’s play as a commentary on the long and bloody history of Irish resistance to English tyranny, and the ways in which Irish national identity has been affected by this struggle. The barren, desolate landscape becomes Ireland; the “bog” an Irish bog. Didi and Gogo’s tattered clothes indicate them as poor, uneducated people, and their absurd behavior and rodent-like memory spans can be seen as a manifestation of the “buffoonery and easy sentiment” that was present in stereotyped performances of Irish people on stage in Yeats’ time during the early inception of The Abbey Theater. Rural images of shepherds, goats, and turnips point to Ireland’s rural society and background, and religious references in the play suddenly become Catholic references. The casting of Pozzo and Lucky, too, affects the interpretation of the play; as whatever their cultural identity is will always be in direct conversation with Didi and Gogo’s Irish national identity. In the case of the McGovern/Murphy version, Pozzo’s upper-class English dialect brings England and Ireland into a conversation, thus allowing an audience to bring to their understanding of the play any knowledge, feelings, or sentiments about the entanglement between these two nations. This juxtaposition brings to light themes of the oppression of the Irish under British rule, and more broadly the themes of class inequality, mankind’s capacity for cruelty through the subjugation of other human beings, and the loss of identity that comes with it. Didi and Gogo’s inability to remember who they are and where they came from, is instead replaced with a vague sense of “Irish-ish cultural-ness”; which essentially boils down to a vague, inherent knowledge of a Bible-based religion and nothing more. Didi and Gogo’s struggle to understand the meaning of their existential existence gives us an understanding of Ireland as a nation that is still trying to figure out what, exactly, its cultural identity is, and what it really means to be Irish in a world where Irish culture is more commodified than it is concrete.
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