Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot is firmly established as one of the seminal texts of 20th-century theater. It has been performed countless times by theaters large and small since it premiered in 1953 and remains, in the eyes of Stan Lai (
Lai used the play for his doctoral work in theater 20 years ago and he has often used it when teaching theater in Taiwan. The Chinese translation of the play to be staged next week is Lai's own, put together from his teaching notes and from an abortive production from 10 years ago. Lai brings his considerable theatrical experience to this play and emphasized that the translation was "performance-oriented," rather than a work of literature.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP
Beckett's play tells of two vagrants who are waiting for someone called Godot to arrive. Godot never does, but in seeking to pass the time waiting for this mysterious character, Estragon and Vladimir unwittingly play out some of the fundamental mysteries of existence. At its most simple, the play, in a fundamental statement of existential angst, asks: What are we doing here?
While often classified as part of the theater of the absurd, Lai says that the portrayal of such waiting is part of our everyday lives. It is not absurd at all, he said, as we are doing it all the time. "After Typhoon Nari, I spent hours and hours waiting for the electricity to come back on. For me then, electricity was Godot. I felt helpless to do anything until it arrived."
Waiting for Godot deals with such profound issues that, Lai said, many people are intimidated by the play. "Virtually every drama student has dealt with Waiting for Godot at some point," he said. "They all feel it is very deep, very difficult." But, taking the disjointed dialogue as an example, he said: "This is how people speak. There is rarely a clear lineal connection to the way we talk." The influence of Beckett on modern drama in this last aspect is monumental.
One of the most notable characteristics of Performance Workshop's production of Waiting for Godot is in the stage design. They have opted to follow very literally the simple stage directions given in the play. "A country road. A tree. Evening." This is all Beckett wrote, and this is what Performance Workshop spectacularly achieves.
"We have run a catwalk from the depths of the stage through the auditorium to the back of the theater," Lai said. This is remarkable in many ways, not least because the notoriously conservative National Theater has agreed to the conversion of a part of the seating area into performance space. "I felt that they gave me respect as an artist," Lai said. "It was important that they were willing to talk about it."
All the action takes place on the 40m-long florescent orange catwalk -- the road in the stage directions. In using a layout that runs perpendicular to the stage and into the seating, Lai says he is getting closer to what the play intended, as the road is symbolic of the road of life, a road that we can choose to follow or not. For Estragon and Vladimir, they remain on the road, helpless as they wait for Godot to arrive.
The innovative stage design is not possible in the performance venues in Taichung and Kaohsiung, where the seating areas are too steep, but Lai has decided to preserve the concept by other means. Instead, he has brought the audience up onto the stage, so that the actors still perform with the audience on either side of the stage.
"In fact, you can watch a show in Taipei, and watch it again in Taichung or Kaohsiung, and the effect will be different," Lai said jokingly.
His good humor is buoyed by generally strong ticket sales at a time when Taiwan's theater is taking a beating from the economic recession and the effects of local and international disasters. In response to Hugh Lee's (
Performance Information:
What: Waiting for Godot (等待狗頭)
Who: Performance Workshop (表演工作坊)
When & Where: Oct. 10 to Oct. 13, 7:30pm, Oct. 14, 2:30pm, at the National Theater, Taipei. Oct. 20, 7:30pm at Chihshan Hall, Kaohsiung. Oct. 27, 7:30pm at the Chungshan Hall, Taichung.
Tickets: NT$300 to NT$1,800 from the National Theater tel: (02)2343-1363 or from ERA ticketing for Taichung and Kaohsiung shows.
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