In a threadbare Paris theatre, on January 5, 1953, several years after the playwright Samuel Beckett had fled the sharp censors in his native Ireland, the groundbreaking ”Waiting for Godot”, first graced the stage.
The audience in the impoverished Babylon theatre met the play with mixed reactions but the critics were won over, according to Barry McGovern, who is currently playing Vladimir in a 50th-anniversary production of the work at Dublin’s Gate theatre.
”Samuel Beckett is a subversive spirit, you can’t imagine how comforting that is,” Guy Dumur, a prominent French critic had written at the time in Combat magazine.
Beckett, who was born in Dublin in 1906 and died in Paris in 1989, was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1969. ”He would be amused, perhaps a little bemused also, by the celebrations,” ventured Phyliis Gaffney, a Dublin university lecturer whose father was a close friend of Beckett’s.
”The Ireland he left (aged 31) was very inward-looking, small-minded, and censorship was stringent. The Catholic Church ruled over every aspect of life. It was hard for him, who belonged to the Protestant minority,” she added.
”Beckett was hit hard by the 1929 censorship laws when he published his ”More pricks than kicks” book of folk tales in 1934,” Gaffney said.
But 50 years on, Beckett has become a revered member of the Irish literary canon.
According to Gaffney, ”Waiting for Godot” ”will always speak to young Irish people because its themes are universal: misfortune, a resounding cry for help, but above all the — very Irish — notion that a sense of humour can ease even the worst suffering.”
”It is timeless because of all of us are waiting all our lives for something whether you are a believer in God or the afterlife or an atheist,” said McGovern.
”It was famously played in San Quentin prison in San Francisco in 1956. The prisoners had a great empathy for the play. Of course all the prisoners there were waiting for Godot all their lives, some were on death row,” he added.
When it first appeared, the play was ”very controversial” in London and Berlin, according to German stage director Walter Asmus, who directed the Gate theatre production.
”It’s a great honour for me,” said Asmus (61) who worked as Beckett’s assistant in 1975 and has directed the play several times since then.
”I tried to come into the play from scratch again not just reproduce anything, I tried to find out where it could be controversial, a challenge,” he said.
”I tried to keep as faithful as I could to (Beckett’s) idea of the play. I think he would have been neither proud nor satisfied, but pleased with it — although he would not have shown it.”
”Lucky’s speech makes sense more than ever, for me it’s almost a political theme nowadays… The play was written in 1948-49, after the war, the speech makes a political point about war.”
The speech in question in an opaque monologue delivered by one of the play’s characters, Lucky, and often seen as pivotal to the play as a whole. Asmus recalled how an actor once approached Samuel Beckett to tell him that he found new things in the play every day. Beckett paused, before looking piercingly up and replying ”me too”.
The German director already has plans for a joint celebration to be held between Dublin, Paris and Berlin on the 100th anniversary of Beckett’s birth, in 2006. – Sapa-AFP