To appropriate a quote from Tennessee Williams, “Sometimes—there’s Godot—so quickly!” But also, sometimes, life just happens, and you have to roll with it. There was no rehearsal Tuesday or Friday last week, one day due to unforeseen circumstances and the other because the Birmingham Festival Theatre hosted a special event. My week itself was so frantic and fast-paced, particularly at work, there are only flashes of memories from that week’s rehearsals.
We worked for the first time with the Boy, an emissary from Godot who visits Didi and Gogo in the final moments of each act. Tank, the actor playing the Boy, and I share an affinity from Beckett, which thrilled me upon first meeting him. He apparently has read Beckett’s prose, which I’ve never gotten around to; outside of Beckett’s theatrical output, I’ve only read the poetry which is horribly underrated.
I realized during these rehearsals I was giving the same Gogo to my director each night—a sort of overly despairing figure who was dragging the scenes down to a slow crawl. This might have been because, shortly before rehearsals, I watched and listened to many different Godots. A brilliant recording of the original Broadway cast was preserved on LP and is thankfully available on Youtube. The original American Gogo was, believe it or not, Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. And each time Godot’s name is mentioned on the recording, there is rattling percussion accompanied by terrifying echoes. Maybe that effect seeped into my affectation of “Ah!” every time Didi says, “We’re waiting for Godot.” Don’t get me wrong—the play is despairing, but it is also a comedy and Didi and Gogo were based on Beckett’s favorite silent film tramps, such as Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy.
I also watched a tiny miracle—the 1961 telecast of Godot starring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel(!)—a nice rendering, if a bit stiff at times, though this can be forgiven by the small screen with which they had to compress it. Mostel was a towering figure on Broadway—both brilliant to audiences and maddening to his collaborators. But there has never been one performance of his I’ve seen that has not been worth watching. You can learn a lot from him.
Another version of the play was produced for RTÉ, Channel 4, and the Irish Film Board’s massive project Beckett on Film, released in 2002. They made a film version of every one of Beckett’s stage plays. The result, like the 1980s BBC Shakespeare was a mixed bag—some of the films soared, particularly Anthony Minghella’s rendering of Play with Alan Rickman and Conor McPherson’s Endgame with Michael Gambon, but the Godot was one of the wonkier offerings—slow to a crawl but, of course, performed with the correct lilting Irish dialect. When I first auditioned for Godot back in October of last year, my scene partner began the cold reading with a full-on Irish brogue. While I had a feeling we wouldn’t go this route, I had put “Irish dialect” as a specialty on my resumé and one of the cardinal rules of acting is to work off the other actor, so I went full-on with mine. He was a delight to work with and was originally cast, but I’m very happy with my Didi, Cliff Spencer, who has quickly become an invaluable leader of our cast.
The slowness of the Beckett on Film version pales in comparison to the video series Beckett Directs Beckett. Based on Beckett’s mise en scène, so not actually directed by Beckett, this version from 1988 is a veritable bore. I think, in later life, a lot of his famous Irish humor left him. It reminds me of the reason Tom Lehrer stopped writing comedy songs. In his heyday, he would read the news and laugh; in later life, he was more inclined to cry.
Beckett’s later plays, save Ohio Impromptu and a few others, are uncompromisingly bleak I’m not saying the earlier ones aren’t, but the later plays, like Rockaby (a masterpiece itself) lack the lighter moments of plays like Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days. It was almost as if Beckett read what people wrote about him and that altered his work to reflect a different Beckett, a dourer one than he had been in the days when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Most actors would probably not do what I did and would avoid watching other versions so as not to affect their performance, but I was never really affected by seeing other versions when acting in previous productions. And, when I did view, say, Daniel Day-Lewis’ Proctor before performing mine, I made conscious decisions to make entirely different choices on purpose so as not to be compared. So, there is value in it if you’re able to compartmentalize.
So, after watching all these dull, dusty Gogos, the Thursday night rehearsal provided me the opportunity to try a different tack—giving Keke (the director)—something to work with that was different and lighter, playing up the banter, and the result was a new chemistry between Didi and I that finally found a rhythm and wasn’t stultified by the fact that we’re still both holding the text in our hands.
While the actor playing Lucky was on vacation, the actor playing Pozzo had some one-on-one time with the director and one night with Didi and I that remained productive, as Lucky is a silent role, save the famous monologue. Pozzo, in the first act, is a towering figure in my character’s eyes as he allows me to suck the bones of his thrown-away chicken chunks, which I will have to mime onstage somehow as no one should ever eat off a stage floor (no matter how clean). See you next week!
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