"WAITING FOR GODOT" AT COMÉDIE DE CAEN #6

Twelve days away from opening night, we have to pay attention to everything: the set, the stage design, the actors’ intent in performance… Below are the latest news from the rehearsals currently taking place at Comédie de Caen, told from within by two protagonists: Lorenzo Malaguerra and Jean Lambert-wild (who plays Lucky).

 

Beckett and painting

Beckett admitted to Ruby Cohn that Waiting for Godot’s writing had as its starting point a piece by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich called “Two Men Contemplating the Moon”.

 

There are many connections between Beckett and painting: his correspondence is testament to this, and his aesthetic writings show his profound affinity with pictorial art. He was an amateur of art. He used to visit museums and was a friend of Giacometti, Henry Hayden, Avidgor Arikha. In Waiting for Godot, we find evidence of this interest in the descriptions and in the care Beckett applied to each stage direction, to the blocking and to the lighting design. 

 

But we have to be careful not to confuse an image’s aesthetic beauty with the way a painting resonates in our thoughts. What is it, in the play, that becomes a picture? This is not just a question for the set or the lighting. It is also about acting, the costumes, the blocking, about the periods of sustained immobility taking place in the “Silences”.

 

In a letter to Duthuit, writing about set designer Nicolas de Staël’s ideas for Waiting for Godot, Beckett said: “He looks at it like a painter, and for me, this is aestheticism. The sets of ballet and theatre have been turned into an addition to painting, which is detrimental to them, I think. It is Wagnerian (…) the set design must come out of the text without adding to it. As for the spectators’ visual convenience, they can shove it.”

 

 

Feeling our way along, we progress

We have to stay watchful and not let easy temptations lead us. This means paying attention to detail but also finding a certain colour of spirit… At times red, grey or pallid like the moon.

The backdrops we use in our set and the moon that rises at the end of each act have been the topic of many rough conversations with Renaud Lagier, whose bond with Jean Lambert-wild is great since they have been working together for over twenty years. For instance, should we naively represent the moon using an illuminated mobile, evoke it with a few rays, or turn the whole set into a mirror of the Selenites’ star! We tried several things with Patrick Demière, Comédie de Caen’s set-maker, to find the right hues and materials that would allow the lighting design to accompany the text, to reveal without excessive embellishment what is at play in each act. We studied all of the text’s references, the ones uttered by the characters or written as stage directions, to analyse the pictorial evolution of each act. We were delighted by some of what we found, and were left with suspiciously bitter eyes by some other elements. However, feeling our way along, we were making progress, determined not to corrupt our vision with ideas that wouldn’t produce meaning. 

 

“POZZO: (…) Will you look at the sky, pig! (Lucky looks at the sky.) Good, that’s enough. (They stop looking at the sky.) What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at this hour of the day...”

 

 

“But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”

Now, we have to put into the light what is at play, what is being said. It is a radical endeavour since being too gentle would weaken the tragedy but too much darkness would alter some of the laughs’ paradoxical dimension. We have to find light’s own forms of silence. Lights, on stage, are a form of writing that projects life outside of its envelope. It is our guide in the abyss. The goad of infinity. A luminous needle that pierces through time, space and matter. It comes into being both inside and outside of us, it dances on that curtain of skin, the last parenthesis between oneself and the image of the world. It crawls and feeds the shadows. The stage is a black cube, a model of the abyss, but it is also a corner of sky built by humans to put humans into the light… As Vladimir says “(…) But at this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. (…)”

 

Today, just before we started rehearsals, we received an email from our friend Benoît Monneret. In it, some intelligent thoughts that will guide us through the day. “What strikes me with Beckett is his tenderness. Onto a grey world, he applied a rose-orange colour. We feel like we are going to suffocate, but the opposite happens: we breathe in a restorative air.”

 

EN ATTENDANT GODOT - Carnet de bord # 6

François Royet

Show

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