The waiting game: Waiting for Godot 'didn't, as it were, blow my mind,' says William Hutt of his first encounter with the play a half century ago. Now he's the star
National Post
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
J. Kelly Nestruck
When it comes to controversial plays, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a bit like global warming. Everyone has a strong opinion about it, but few really know what the heck they're talking about.
Albert Schultz, the artistic director of the Soulpepper Theatre Company and director of a production of the venerable play starring William Hutt and Jordan Pettle opening Friday in Toronto, knows what he's up against. "It is one of those plays that people come to thinking they know what it should be like," notes a wary Schultz, taking a break at the University of Toronto theatre where the modern classical theatre company rehearses.
This year marks half a century since Beckett translated his best-known work into English from the original French. In the 50 years that have followed, Waiting for Godot has been parodied and pilloried, and academics have made careers out of analyzing every minute reference to Judeo-Christian theology and Jungian dream theory in Vladimir and Estragon's two-hour wait for the mysterious Godot.
Schultz is dreading the after-show cocktail parties where he will inevitably be questioned about his interpretation of, say, the carrot Didi and Gogo eat in the first act. Is the carrot a symbol of that which is always just out of reach? Is hunger the "root" of all our angst? Are the two peripatetic protagonists of the play really just giant rabbits?
Everyone thinks they have the key to unlocking the mystery of Godot, a play that is driven by atmosphere rather than plot. "We had a national panel of university theatre programs in this building about two weeks ago," Schultz relates. "It was some cruel exercise of fate, because you'd walk out [of rehearsal] and one of them would quote the play and give a reading of a certain line. Just to test us."
Then there's the public's perception that Waiting for Godot is a depressing play to deal with. In Schultz's view, Godot is a funny and even uplifting play. "Though Beckett perceived himself as a pessimist, there's something I think remarkably compassionate and even affirmative to the piece," the director argues, pointing to Vladimir and Estragon's persistence in the face of existential despair. "Great art can never be an act of pessimism: Art comes from hope. The very act of writing something anticipating an audience is an act of hope."
In the discussion of the supposed bleakness of Beckett's work, it is often forgotten that when Godot premiered in Paris in 1953, it was an immediate popular success, running for 400 performances at the Theatre de Babylone before transferring to another Parisian theatre. In the five years that followed, it was translated into more than a dozen languages and seen by more than a million spectators worldwide. It was avant garde, but hardly inaccessible. In fact, some of Waiting for Godot's biggest successes have been in prison performances put on by inmates, who have always felt a certain kinship with the Beckettian canon. (Schultz actually saw a performance at San Quentin in 1983 and ran into Beckett in the prison cafeteria.)
Schultz describes Waiting for Godot as a watershed moment in the history of theatre. "This play marks a radical shift in what was acceptable dramatic practice really," he says. Its influence was quickly felt on both sides of the Atlantic in plays like Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter (1957) and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story (1959), both of which, like Godot, feature two men in a menacing and deeply humorous environment. (Soulpepper is presenting these two Godot-inspired one-acts in July.)
Contrary to this theatre history orthodoxy, William Hutt, who is playing Vladimir, does not remember Waiting for Godot's premiere as a particularly earth-shattering moment for theatre. "[The first time I read the play], it was fascinating because it was new, new to me," recalls the 84-year-old Shakespearean actor, who began his professional career at the Stratford Festival in 1953, just before Godot premiered in Paris. "But it didn't, as it were, blow my mind."
Nonetheless, Hutt took on the task of directing Stratford's first production of the play in 1968. Even then, he says, it wasn't considered a particularly hot property. "I did not get the impression at the time that there were a whole raft of productions of [it] being done across the English-speaking theatre," Hutt says. "I frankly now can't remember why I particularly wanted to do Waiting for Godot at the time."
Hutt does know why he wanted to do it this year, though. "I spent so much of my life doing the classics," he says, meaning Mr. William Shakespeare. "It's really quite an interesting voyage to do something completely different from what one has been doing."
Soulpepper, he says, has allowed him to branch out and experiment in his late career, performing in Pinter's No Man's Land last year (for which he earned a Dora nomination) and taking on Beckett as an actor now for the first time. "I'm not going to make a career out of doing Beckett," he notes wryly. "At my age, I'm not going to make a career out of anything, except surviving and doing whatever I can."
The big difference with this production, what makes it stand out on the surface anyway, is that Hutt is playing Vladimir opposite an Estragon 50 years younger than himself. Jordan Pettle, 32, who played the Fool to Hutt's Lear at Stratford in 1996, was not born until Beckett had already been recognized as one of the most important writers of the last century.
Though Vladimir and Estragon are usually played by men about the same age, Hutt immediately thought of Pettle as an actor he would like to play opposite when Schultz brought up the idea of doing Godot. "There are a few lines about age, but ultimately with plays like Godot, you know, one can take liberties with the piece itself without destroying it, because it is in its own way such a gossamer piece: thin, light, hovering between Heaven and Earth." The play could take place anywhere in any time and, as Hutt says, "The play isn't firmly grounded. You can ask at he end of the play, 'Did this play ever take place?' "
(Beckett himself was open to casting an older Vladimir with a younger Estragon and, in fact, that was almost the case for the first English-language production. An American theatre director proposed to put the play on with Buster Keaton and Marlon Brando in 1954, but unfortunately a problem with the rights killed that production, something Beckett always regretted.)
Putting on Waiting for Godot now is a different animal than 50 years ago, because modern audiences all know that the titularcharacter never shows up. Hutt says foreknowledge is no more of a barrier than it is when putting on one of Shakespeare's popular plays. "You go into a production of Romeo and Juliet, you know they're going to die at the end," he explains. "We can't change the script to say, 'Oh, he's coming, he's coming,' and have somebody appear with a long white beard at the curtain. There's nothing one can do ... In point of fact, the evening is not about the appearance of Godot; it's about waiting."
As for Hutt, having conquered Pinter and Beckett with Soulpepper, he has one remaining theatrical wish. "I'd like to do a brand new play. But the person who was going to write me a play, Tiff [Timothy] Findlay, died."
So, is he still waiting for someone to write him a role that will forever be associated with him? The legendary actor smiles: "I'm waiting for Godot."
posted by J. Kelly 4:03 PM