"WAITING FOR GODOT" AT COMÉDIE DE CAEN #5

Jean Lambert-wild, Lorenzo Malaguerra and Marcel Bozonnet are always exploring. Little by little, the characters of Waiting for Godotgive away their secrets. What follow are a few notes taken by the directors themselves, on the spot, about Pozzo (Marcel Bozonnet), Lucky (Jean Lambert-wild), Estragon and Vladimir. The show opens on the 18thMarch…

 

Understanding Pozzo better

“Pozzo is a twat!” exclaimed Marcel Bozonnet. “I just found an interview with Roger Blin. And he’s totally right, Pozzo is a twat!” It is rarely the most sophisticated of directions that allow an actor to act well. Defending a character doesn’t always mean making them more intelligent than they are. “A twat”, which came as an illumination, and suddenly the character is full of a rawer and more direct energy. This gives each line another dimension, all at once mean, cruel and funny. This is also what allows us to better understand why Pozzo doesn’t listen to the questions he is asked, why he embarks on a third-rate lyrical soliloquy and keeps a man on a leash.

 

Lucky: slave? prisoner? concentration camp survivor?

Since the start of the rehearsal process, Jean Lambert-wild has been wearing the striped pyjamas that make up his clown, as if Lucky had been living in him for a while. A red nose, a little bowler hat in the same colour complete this image. The fact is, Lucky’s identity fluctuates. Who is he, actually: a slave? A prisoner? Someone who survived the concentration camps? A “Knook”, like Pozzo says he is? We have found it more interesting to play Lucky as someone who feels infinite gratitude toward his master. This creates a real and very murky relationship between master and slave. Lucky is also famous for going through a terrible, seven-minute long monologue with no punctuation. Far from being a logorrhoea without a beginning or an end, Beckett suggests that this bit of the text is actually what gives the tone for the whole play, as we see in a note he wrote for the staging of Waiting for Godotin Berlin. If we follow this note, then Lucky must give meaning to this apparently incoherent speech. 

 

Lucky: “(…) in the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by the seas by the rivers running water running fire the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold (…)”

 

 

Estragon and Vladimir: two crippled characters who evoke the dark side of the 20thcentury

Beckett gives physical clues for how Estragon and Vladimir should be played, and these clues influence the performance. One has painful feet, the second always needs a wee. Fargass Assandé and Michel Bohiri have this rare ability to act truthfully on their first attempt – or almost, and to inhabit their bodies in an inimitable way: one limping slightly, the other doubled over to hold it in. Of the two characters, Estragon might be the hardest to play, because for him, waiting is unbearable: sustaining the energy of despair for two hours is not easy. Vladimir, on the other hand, has the big responsibility of comforting his comrade, supporting and reassuring him, giving him with his coat when he is cold. In places, Beckett put biographical elements in Vladimir and Estragon’s mouths, which gives the play historical density and makes its characters tangible. In the French version, Beckett references Roussillon, where he lived in a house during WW2; he also evokes mass graves that inevitably remind us of the Holocaust, turning Godot into a play located on the dark side of the 20thcentury. Michel Bohiri told us, before he burst out laughing, how he escaped militia by hiding under his bed. When he turns to face the audience, his presence sharply invokes our European ghosts, making them modern.

 

Estragon: “The best thing would be to kill me, like the other.

Vladimir: What other? (Pause.) What other?

Estragon: Like billions of others.

Vladimir: (sententious). To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.”

 

 

 

The boy: an enigma

The fifth character of the play is the boy, without a doubt the one that lends itself to the more interpretations. There are no instructions about who he is, what he does, what he’s wearing. Last week, while we were thinking about it, we looked through images of Jewish children who had been deported. The boy has a tragic dimension, equal to his innocence and the economy of his speech, which makes him a very different character from the others. As a sign of his particular status, he is the only one who is not wearing a bowler hat; instead, he only wears a cap that covers the fragile silhouette of actor Lyn Thibault. 

 

Vladimir: “Has he a beard, Mr. Godot?

Boy: Yes Sir

Vladimir: Fair or … (he hesitates)… or black?

Boy: I think it’s white, Sir.” 

 

Silence.

 

Vladimir: “Christ have mercy on us!”

 

In a moment of truth, this “have mercy on us” sounds the death knell of all hope.

 

 

EN ATTENDANT GODOT - Carnet de bord # 5

François Royet

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