Tobacco Factory
It's a pretty good joke. Three actors, dressed as tramps, are on the phone to Samuel Beckett's estate. (One of them has forgotten to put any trousers on.) They want clearance to stage Waiting for Godot, which remains in copyright until 2059. They are being held in a call waiting system; number eighteen thousand and something. So they have to find something to do. While waiting. To pass the time.
Silent Faces describe themselves as clowns; so there is never any suggestion that this will be a realistic drama. The first fifteen minutes, at least, is pure physical comedy; passing the telephone receiver between themselves; dancing in time with the call-waiting music; switching hats. It's perfectly timed, very funny, but aty no point over the top; drawing you in rather than hitting you over the head. Beckett's tramps are certainly, among other things, clowns -- Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen explicitly made them down-on-their-luck vaudeville performers -- so a clown-centric production of Godot would have been a not un-interesting proposition. I'm sure this group would have done it brilliantly.
But there's a problem. Josie Underwood and Cordelia Stevenson are women; Jack Wakely is non-binary.(There was a brief cringe in the Q and A after the show when I thought a member of the audience was going to pretend they didn't know what pronouns were, but it passed.) And the Beckett estate insists on absolute fidelity to Sam's intentions. Debrah Warner was banned from producing his texts, for life, because she changed a single line and disregarded a stage direction in her 1994 production of Footfalls. Beckett's descendants will not licence, and indeed, will take legal action to block, any gender-swapped or gender-blind productions of his plays. (They have reluctantly permitted cross-dressed productions -- i.e ones where female actors present the characters as male.)
So: the play unfolds around sketches, improvs, and flights of fantasy around the theme, without ever touching on Beckett's copyrighted dialogue. There's an extended riff on the carrot-eating scene, with one clown delicately peeling the vegetables while the others eat them in unison. There's an extended three hats / two heads routine, with a fourth hat seeming to induce a headache in anyone who wears it. There are multiple comedic dances and at least one somersault.
The cast know their Beckett. "The story of the legends" -- a narrative about how Fiona Shaw and Maggie Smith were not allowed to perform Godot, but Stewart and McKellen were -- riffs on "the story of the Englishman in the brothel" and the dialogue about the Two Thieves. The text of Godot dangles from the ceiling, out of reach, like the water in Act Without Words. Later one of the cast's mouths performs a long, disjointed monologue in a pretty decent pastiche of Not I. And they perfectly catch the elliptical, circular repetitive dialogue of Godot. Artistic clowning can sometimes be a little mannered or even "precious", but until perhaps the very final scenes, it had a light, friendly, touch. I was watching three people being very silly and very funny. I never felt I was in the presence of capital A Art.
The centrepiece of the production is an absurdist court-room in which the cast attempt to put Beckett's estate on trial. ("Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Godot?") It's a virtuoso piece of physical theatre with the roles -- of the judge, the prosecution, the defence and the witnesses being passed from actor to actor at high speed. And it presents an intelligent and relatively nuanced account of the arguments around female Godots. A copyright lawyer is called to explain the estates objections. Two comical doctors explain the male urinary system, in response to the claim that Vladimir is necessarily male because there is a running joke about his prostate. (Response: It isn't actually stated as such in the text; and there are other reasons why a character might urgently need to run off stage for a wee.)
In so far as we care about the arguments, they run as follows:
1: Estragon and Vladimir are everyman figures and the play deals with universal experiences of boredom, despair and mortality: there is no reason why half the audience shouldn't see themselves reflected on stage. (Yes, but the tramps are also fairly specifically characterised and placed in a particular milieux: they are clearly Irish catholics who grew up in the 1920s.)
2: Beckett wrote excellent parts for women -- indeed his two best roles, Winnie in Happy Days and the Mouth in Not I -- were created for Billie Whitelaw. But there is an inherent sexism to these roles: unlike Estragon and Vladimir, they are substantially defined by their relationships with men. (Yes; but that's because after Endgame Beckett's plays become increasingly realistic -- Winnie and Krapp are definitely people, despite their absurd predicament, in a way that Estragon and Ham really are not. It's true that Winnie is specifically a woman (and Krapp is specifically a man) but I don't think we can write the play's off as sexist. I entirely take the point about "low bodice, big bosom, pearl necklace" as a stage direction, but the suggestion that Not I treats women as objects is way over the top.)
3: One member of the cast, Jack, is transgender, and there are no specifically transgender roles in Beckett or indeed classical drama. If you could only play a character of the same gender as yourself, trans people would be effectively banned from the stage. (Jack plays this part of the trial pretty much in his own persona, with no "clowning". "Do you identify as non-binary" "No, I don't 'identify'; I am non-binary.")
4: When Beckett died in 1989, the feminist movement had not advanced as far as it has done since. There is a big-set piece dance routine in which the cast make a list of leaps forward women have made in the last thirty years -- the Me-Too Movement, the ordination of women, the first all female space-walk -- and comedically juxtaposes them with popular music by female singers from the same year. So it is entirely possible that, had Beckett lived to be a hundred and sixteen, he might have changed and moderated his views. (Yes: but it is equally possible that he might have gone the way of John Cleese or JK Rowling and embraced radical anti-wokism. It's pointless to ask what what have happened; and it's doubly pointless to wonder what an historical person would have thought.)
The play has some difficulty coming to a conclusion: it ends with the cast stripping down to their underwear; hanging up the phone; and running off the stage. The message is that it would be better to create something new than worry about Godot; and the joke, of course, is that while the tramps can't leave the stage ("they do not move") the clowns can. In the Q & A, the cast admitted that, in real life, once they had been made aware of the Beckett estate's attitude, they hadn't attempted to contact them.
We have recently had to go through a rather silly reactionary backlash about the sanctity of literary texts. I was rather shocked but not particularly surprised to discover that the PG Wodehouse Facebook Group takes the view that "Plum's books" (oh, god) were so utterly perfect that the deletion of the word n*gg*r would amount to sacrilege, and furthermore, that the addition of mild editorial statements noting that the books contained offensive and outdated language would be the literal equivalent of Nazi book burnings. The furore about Puffin's plan to make larger alterations to the text of Roald Dahl's children's books was a little more substantive -- but over and over again the idea comes up that an author is harmed or violated when his works are altered. The Spectator's (mostly laudatory) review of Godot Was a Woman said that Beckett was not being a chauvinist, when he took legal action to prevent an all female company from staging Godot in 1988. "In fact, he was merely protecting his work from misinterpretation by vandals who disrespected his artistry." Rather surprisingly, the Guardian theatre critic had described the Debra Warner Footfalls (which allowed a character to move around the stage when Beckett had instructed that they remain static) in similar terms, as "doodling on a Rembrandt."
Creative re-interpretation as vandalism. I am reminded of Tolkien fans who said that Peter Jackson had violated Lord of the Rings. "No he hasn't. I checked my copy, and it is exactly the same as it always was."
Which makes me wonder if Godot Is A Woman had the wrong target in its sights. The question is not what Beckett really wanted, or what he would have wanted: the question is whether we should give a tinker's cuss about the authors likes and dislikes. The question is not whether a given production is faithful to the letter or the spirit of the play; the question is whether fidelity is something that theatres should be remotely interested in. The argument is really between those who see texts as monolithic, monovocal and inviolable; and those who think that literature in general and theatre in particular is an ongoing series of conflicting re-interpretations. Between those who think that the job of a producer is to present a neutral account of what the play "really" means, and those who want to take the toys out of the box, play with them for a bit, and then return them to the box for the next person to have a go at.
I've previously mentioned a production of "Queen" Lear, which shone interesting new light on Shakespeare's text by inverting the genders of every single character in the play. It might be that an all female Godot would similarly illuminate the text: that "astride of the grave and a difficult birth" and "that's how it is on this bitch of an earth" would mean different things when spoken by a woman. Or it might not make very much difference at all. The only way of finding out is to do it. That's what theatre is for. I'd like to see the experiment, but I suspect I will be waiting a very long time.
In the text of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir says that the act of suicide by hanging will give him an erection.
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you enjoy these reviews, please consider leaving a tip on the Ko-Fi platform.
If you can afford it, please consider becoming a Patreon, by pledging £1 or more each time I publish an essay on the main blog. (I don't charge for these little reviews.)
Please do not feed the troll.
No comments:
Post a Comment