NOTES FROM the

UNDERGROUND

Herbert Blau

one learns, in doing them,that the plays - with their whoroscopic revelations and buried performances - are always

looking on themselves, throwing up readings, telling you how to do them. If any dramatist has the right to speak of

drama ... it is Beckett. And he means what is there ... The tree is meant to be done. The empty landscape waits to be

recognized. The boots wait to be worn ...

    As for uncertainty of meaning, just perform what he tells you to perform, and you will feel - as if by some equation

between doing and feeling - exactly what you need to feel, and in the bones ... Speak the speech of Lucky trippingly

on the tongue, clutching through all the eschatological gibberish at the loose ends of Western philosophy ... Let the

tramps and Pozzo pummel you at the same time ... Try to hang yourself upon the tree ... and you will see, decidedly,

the degree to which the tree is useless. Eat Gogo’s carrot

and try to carry on a conversation and you will know

quite materially that a carrot is a carrot.

    ... Even thinking is a physical task, not only for Lucky.

Look at Didi’s face agonized with the effort to use his

intelligence. Our actors discovered the physical in-

vestment demanded of them in this apparently in-

tellectual play, as they discovered a new conception

of character-in-action ...

    Because the waiting, for all its avowed purpose, is

purely gratuitous, it is bound to look comic - especially

when, as Pozzo, the heart seems to stop. If, like Chaplin,

the tramps are victims too, there is a comparable sweet-

ness in the terror. And unconscious power: Godot is con-

cealed in their names.

    The movement is circular, like a worn-out wheel of

fortune at a deserted fairground, mysteriously turning.

Having come out of history like shadows, the tramps

are nothing but, and something more than, the con-

crete fact of the time they pass. And the question of

Time in the theater is limned in their every gesture. Time-

in-space ... The future stirs in the magic circle, wheels

within wheels within wheels.

    And with all its pretended anti-drama, we know it

is brazenly theatrical - an occasion for Talent: the Noh,

the pantomime, the music hall, the circus, the Greek

messenger, and the medieval angel; the play is a

history of dramatic art. There is even the Secret of

the well-made play ... Who is Godot? Will he come?

    Someone cries, another weeps - by the sorcery of form Beckett defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Energy

is pumped back into the dead system by having it come back from the other side of the stage, crippled and much

worse for wear, crying pitiably for help and then behaving like an Ancient Hero, wisdom comes from suffering:

   “ Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not

    enough for you, one day he‘went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one

    day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (CALMER) They give birth astride of

    a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. (HE JERKS THE ROPE.) On!” - Pozzo, Act 2

   ... As character grows fabulous, so does nature - with the same paucity of means. The tree grows leaves, the moon

is hung on a chain; Beckett’s “bleeds” out of the sky ... Beckett is the most conspicuous dramatist of Alienation ...

                                                                                                              Godot, indeed, gives the definitive turn to the idea of

                                                                                                          Alienation. A subterranean drama, appearing to care for

                                                                                                           nothing but its interior life, it searches the audience like a

                                                                                                           Geiger counter ... The Chekovian silences ... It is then, in

                                                                                                            silence that the whole emotive tapestry of the theatrical

                                                                                                            event can be heard ... Here they are actually engaged

                                                                                                            in a competition of sound and image, two performers

                                                                                                            trying to top each other, while character disappears in

                                                                                                            the metabolism . If nobody comes, together they are

                                                                                                            sufficient ...

                                                                                                                If Waiting for Godot was another testament to the

                                                                                                            decay of language, it was no mere pantomime of

                                                                                                            impoverished rhetoric, a mere autotelic gabble of words,

                                                                                                            words, words. Beckett worked like an engraver or

                                                                                                            diamond cutter ... His personal addiction is to the

                                                                                                             hardest task ... As Roger Blin pointed out, ... “In daily

                                                                                                             life we are confronted with a positive personality;  

                                                                                                             a man who has fought indignities.”

                                                                                             **From the Australian WORLD TOUR of  Beckett Directs Beckett,  Playbill, 1983-84

                                                                                                       

cast

Vladimir                Bud Thorpe

Estragon              Lawrence Held

Lucky                    Alan Mandell

Pozzo                    Rick Cluchey

Boy                        Louis Beckett Cluchey

Director                Samuel Beckett/Walter  D. Asmus