Godot reaffirmed as masterpiece at Smock Alley
It may not be generally known that the drama-loving audiences of Navan were amongst the first to see Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting For Godot’ over 60 years ago, with theatre-goers from Paris, London and Dublin.
At the end of a five-month run in Dublin, director Alan Simpson and the Pike Theatre presented the piece in the CYMS Hall in Navan in the week following the Meath Drama Festival, a massive and prestigious festival in its day.
The Meath Chronicle in March 1956 introduced it as “one of the most controversial and best publicised plays ever written”, and that Navan audiences would be among the first provincial theatre-goers to see it.
Pozzo - Gerard Byrne in Smock Alley's current production of 'Waiting for Godot'.
The preview continues: “The author is an Irishman from Dublin who has resided in Paris for some time past. The play was first presented in Paris and it ran there for two years. At present, it is running at the Criterion Theatre in London, as well as in Dublin.”
The play was coming to Navan just a few weeks after it had been published in book form, and the writer explained that, in reviewing it, a correspondent of an Irish paper confessed that, having read it through, he had not an idea of what it was all about.
“However, the reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement is not so despairing. He says: “No new play on the London stage has had a more unexpected and exciting success in recent years than Mr Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’. Audiences and critics have, in this country, immediately apprehended its appeal, but there has been no serious attempt to define its theme. …. It is anything but boring. It instead extracts from the idea of boredom the most genuine pathos and enchanting comedy.”
He says that Mr Beckett’s heroes are “two tramps who have come from nowhere in particular, and have nowhere in particular to go.”
This present day writer first came across Godot in a TV film made in 2001, with Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy starring, and like the reviewer of the book half a century earlier, had no idea what it was about, not having up to then known much about Beckett except those stunning black and white images by photographer John Minihan, portraying Beckett as a dark master of writing - or so I presumed him to be.
Vladimir (Charlie Hughes) and Estagron (Donal Courtney).
My first introduction to Beckett and those images was through the media coverage of his death in Paris in December 1989, at the same time that Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was delivering his last speech during the revolution in his country. It was an era before colour newsprint, and those stark images of Ceaușescu and Beckett stared off the front pages of the mainly broadsheet newspapers at a 15 year-old fascinated by all that was going on across the continent.
While Beckett's writing was described as absurd, I had never expected it to be funny, so I ventured along to the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin last week not knowing quite what to expect from the No Alternative theatre company’s production of ‘Godot’. I certainly didn’t expect to be laughing my way through it.
But then it is described as a ‘tragicomedy in two acts’. Beckett’s play pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post World War II Europe and man’s inexhaustible search for meaning.
On a bleak country road, by a tree, in evening, Vladimir (Charlie Hughes) and Estagron (Donal Courtney) wait endlessly for the arrival of Godot, discussing religion, contemplating suicide (only they have nothing to hang themselves properly from the tree), and our demise as a civilisation, in a comical word play of poetry, dreamscapes and nonsense.
Godot – if he exists – never arrives, but passing through (or did they?) were Pozzo (Gerard Byrne) and his woebegone, overladen carrier Lucky (Rex Ryan), who on a sultry summer’s evening in the Dublin theatre coped admirably with the heat - as did all the cast in their boots and overcoats – and gave a spectacular demonstration of how to think when his shackles were thrown off him and his ‘thinking hat’ placed on his head.
Rex Ryan, the ironically named Lucky.
Smock Alley is an ideal setting for Godot with its simple, bleak, set, and the audience practically on stage with the players in an intimate setting. This closeness means the tension when Godot’s messenger arrives at the end of each act (12 year-old Darren Shields as Boy) to say he would not be coming (“maybe tomorrow”) is all the more riveting.
And director Patrick Sutton had to face up to his own journey of existence before returning to the director’s chair for this production, having recovered from surgery on a brain tumour he discovered he had while on the cusp of his final submission of his PhD paper in UL. The director of the Gaiety School of Acting for 27 years, he is also the director of Smock Alley Theatre, bringing the theatre back to its original former glory of 1662, thus making it the oldest surviving theatre in Ireland.
It is the perfect stage for a tragicomedy masterpiece that reminds us of the beauty of language and our own existence, voted the "most significant English language play of the 20th century".
Darren Shields as Boy.
Waiting For Godot …no alternative… in association with ETHOS, until 10 Aug | 7:30pm | 2:30pm matinees on Sat | Main Space.