Waiting For the Beckett Police

(Sagacity?, University of Western Sydney, August 1994)

On Thursday the 7th of August, 1994, The Darlinghurst Theatre Company received notice that the play they had been performing for two weeks, Samuel Beckett's classic Waiting for Godot, had to be taken off the stage. The reason: there were women in it-and Sam was stirring in his grave!

Beckett apparently stated in his will that no women should be permitted to perform in Waiting for Godot. The English representatives of Beckett's estate demanded the cancellation of the rest of the play's season at the Wayside Theatre in Kings Cross, for the four main roles (Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo and, of course, the absent 'Miss' Godot herself) were played by female actors. Quite understandably, the issue provoked an uproar.

Is Beckett a sexist bastard? In this era of political correctness, should we burn Beckett?
Samuel Beckett is renowned for the meticulous approach he took to everything he wrote, be it novels, plays, film scripts, radio and television performances, poems and shorter texts. The instructions he left for the staging of his plays and film-scripts are very specific, sometimes obsessively so. This is a trait that also distinguishes his prose, which is painstakingly constructed. In some works, Beckett used music as a model, noting the repetitions of words, the number of letters of each word, and arranging the prose according to its sound, one of the material aspects of language. This elegance and precision, however, is often put to the service of a disturbing, jarring vision, thoroughly drenched in Beckett's trademark black humor-twisted as a swimming-pool full of Twisties, and dark as the primordial Night. His novels have been acclaimed as symphonic in their structure, and the careful translations he made of his own work are masterpieces in themselves. When alive, Beckett personally supervised the staging of his plays—in fact, these are the only occasions he would break out from his legendary reclusiveness. He didn't even bother to pick up the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him in 1969. Apparently his hotel room was far more interesting than the Swedish Academy.

It is certain he would not have approved of the Darlinghurst Theatre production, but that is hardly a reason to justify such a heavy-handed approach. Beckett's decision to not let women play these roles is not due to misogyny on his behalf. In fact, Godot is one of his few plays without any women in it (that is, if we exclude his later pieces for nude torsos, disembodied lips and floating body parts). His qualms relate to the material aspect of voice and breath. Central to his work is the exposure of the naked materiality of language and the body. Language and bodies do not just signify, but they (purely and simply) are. Beckett tantalizes us with the possibility that beyond the signifying systems we impose on the body, there is an absence of meaning, a sheer in-itself. In this scheme, the voice is presented as an object detached from a speaking subject, who is forever alienated from the possibility of truth or of genuine expression. Another of Beckett's plays, Not I, is an example of this, consisting of a mouth floating in complete darkness, endlessly speaking to itself, never reaching a destination, nor any form of meaningful completion. In his perplexing later plays and performance pieces, Beckett continues to explore these themes, reaching a level of abstraction that many have considered self-indulgent. But this 'problem' of the voice reaches possibly its most breathtaking and accomplished expression in the novel The Unnamable, a work that reaches heights of despair and humor unparalleled in the history of modern literature. "Beckett has seen the Gorgon's head and has not turned to stone", a critic spoke of it.

But we are perhaps drifting off the topic here. Beckett believed that the male voice, in this case, with its tone and resonance, was the most appropriate to this particular play.
It is clear, then, that Beckett had very definite ideas in mind when composing his works. The problem, of course, is that Beckett is dead. Funnily enough, another all-female version of Godot was staged at the Adelaide Theatre Festival a few years ago, and it included a pregnant Estragon! Strangely enough, the Beckett police kept quiet about it Hmmm...

It is useless now to be restricted by Beckett's parameters. In fact, it seems to me he would have considered this whole situation quite ironic. Each staging of his work should be taken on its own particular merits. The Darlinghurst Theatre version, directed by David Jobling, was energetic and entertaining. It rescues and highlights the humour of the original, giving it plenty of twists, and discarding the usual gray approach. A friend of mine, who had never heard of Godot or Beckett, said that he couldn't imagine the play being performed by men, so apt were the women in their roles. Naturally, the feminist jokes were given free play ("It's inevitable..."): Godot's messenger, a timid boy in the original, is turned into a lavish blonde male sex-slave, while it is insinuated that Lucky (the other male role) gives Miss Pozzo sexual favors. If anything, these allusions are superficial, and do not really hit home. The play is not geared to handle a feminist comment, except in a camp, oblique manner. That is, the jokes add to the humor of the performance but fail to blend with the main core of the play. The original text is left almost unchanged. The most crucial change is to give Miss Godot long white hair instead of a white beard. In the original play this reference suggests that the mysterious Mr Godot is a metaphor for the Christian god, and that Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for a kind of second coming, or for a divine redemption that will never arrive. In my opinion, the absent Godot should have remained male to make the feminist commentary more effective. If you want to really go post-modern, Godot could have been made to represent the invisible phallocentric structure that will give 'Woman' its symbolic (and impossible) completion.
Besides these minor qualms, the version was fresh and wel performed. Tiffany Palmer was hilarious as the self-centered and annoying Miss Pozzo, while Fiona Sannen as Vladimir and Fiona Mulqueeny as Estragon were vigorous and cheeky. Special mention should be made of Billy Mitchell, whose portrayal of Lucky was extraordinary-that long monologue must surely be hard to remember!

On another note, this incident opens up a variety of issues, some of them quite tricky. In this, the self-proclaimed age of the Death of the Author, it would seem that the control of circulation and authorship shall be forever dictated by legalities. Like the absent Godot, Beckett himself pulls the strings from the afterworld. In other words, the Law has solved the problem of Authorship. Academics might debate until their tongues dry out, yet the question, in the eyes of the Law has been solved (in fact, it was never there to begin with). In this age of Internet and information technologies, this is a crucial question. The joy that may allegedly result from the "liberation" of the text from the intentions of the author is dampened by the realization that state and corporate powers have prevented this from truly occurring. These structures ensure that texts have authors, even those texts that proclaim the Death of the Author. The Death of the Author has also come under attack, for the way it marginalizes the subjectivities of those (such as Third World writers and female writers) who are attempting to build identities through textual spaces.

You can argue all you want, but before the Law you are defenseless. It seems we'll just have to wait at its gates, as in Kafka's famous parable "Before the Law". We can’t readily condemn the Beckett police or Beckett himself. We can say that the Darlinghurst Theatre Company's production has unveiled, quite unwittingly, the work of patriarchal structures of control and authorship-structures that need not be, as Estragon would say, "inevitable..."

posted by Andres Vaccari @ 2:33 PM