This is the third time I've scene Godot - I saw it at Jane Street Theatre in 1980 with Robert Menzies, Mel Gibson, Vivienne Garrett, John Clayton and Geoffrey Rush and the Dublin Gate Theatre at Melbourne Interntational Arts Festival in 1998. Both of those productions were great, different, but I guess shared something of the clown in their approach - the characters were 'performed'. At the time that I saw both productions, I loved them. Then I saw the La Mamma version.
John Flaus and Robin Cuming must be well into their seventies I guess - you look at two tramps, dirty, down and out no-hopers who fit in perfectly to the La Mamma world. The stage is empty apart from the iconic La Mamma wooden coat rack/chair in which Estragon sits, and Vladamir enters from the back lane where bottles are emptied from the restaurants into bins - loudly. (This veritae is neatly worked into the sound design by Roger Alsop because a low-volume bottle emptying presages the cataclysmic and continuing 'bottle emptying into recycle bin' that occurred just on the other side of the back door to the playing space in the second act; how Flaus was able to stay on track while he delivered the longest speech in the play I'll never know).
The raw truth and fragility of these two actors brings Beckett's text to you like a mullet to the forehead - it's a slap I didn't expect. The soft, understatement of Cuming, as he waits for some end to the deluded confusion that envelopes him - like the world around him is spinning so fast that he just can't quite maintain a recogniseable focal point - is quite disturbing to watch. This vulnerability is matched with the throw-away acceptance of their situation by Flaus.
Beckett provides clear deliniation that Vladamir is the leader and Estragon the led. So Flaus' gruff bass suits Cuming's quavering voice; Flaus' height fits Cuming's short; there is of course a grand scheme of characterisation at work in their performances and their pairing, but that's not obvious - it comes across as if Strangio has cast brilliantly, though that may also be the case.
I read an early review of this production in the Age that said the production will run itself in, and I know that, with the death of actor Reg Evans, and Robin Cuming taking over, that rehearsal time was shortened. So glad I was to see it second to last night, because this performance demonstrated the wonder of layering that actors produce.
Peter Finlay plays Pozzo and Alex Pinder Lucky. I'm sure Beckett intends the entry of these two as an event to alleviate the boredom, as red herring to the appearance of Godot, as an alternative reading of the idea of god - that god is a disfunctional slave driver who is losing his mind, or that our lives are actually merely parts of circus performance if only we knew, we could leave the stage and go home to something more meaningful.
So I wouldn't normally write my thoughts down about a production on the internet, except that I've been playing around with my own site, and started a blog, so it seemed like a good opportunity. The second reason is that I was moved to publish something about my experience last night because it was so shattering. It would have been effecting had I seen some version (an illegal one it would have to have been) that cut Pozzo and Lucky from the text.
But with the surgical entry of these two into the tiny playing space - remember that Pozzo is pulled by Lucky harnessed to a rope - that in this case is about five metres long, so Lucky enters from the the stage right door exits through the stage left door, the rope extends across the space and then Pozzo enters, then Pozzo pulls Lucky back into the space - a new cadaver is put on show for us to analyse.
With Finlay's vocal resonance and shamanistic presence and Pinder's Lucky- mute nothingness, beaten, bidden, without hope both pretty apt interpretations from the text in my view another eternal pair is performed.
I could go on and on about it, but I'm tiring of writing now; oh, the tree is a piece of 4x4 probably oak or jarrah with bent nails and useless recesses cut; it was a post from the old La Mamma stairway and it's in two pieces, broken along the vertical line. Then old La Mamma fence palings emanate at right angle from the apex of the pole along the underside of the beams of the second floor of the theatre - it's as though the tree and indeed the whole production has been performing at La Mamma ever since she was built - what would that be, one hundred years ago at least.
Drawing all these crazy threads together in an article is useless - you should have been there. A production of such a great yet difficult play that succeeds in showing me my own dreadful mortality, that summons the questions of existence that Baeckett and Satre first questioned way back when in Paris, provides a link from one human to another. In seeing the absolute dire necessity of Gogo for Didi and vice versa, one understands that ultimately Godot is a play about hope, but that the only hope to be found is in the solace provided between fellow travellers.
As long as I live, I will never forget the the picture of Cuming, Flaus, Finlay and Pinder, with my steeply raked seating position enabling pretty much an overhead view of them scrabbling aboutor asleep or unconscious or watching together on the floor, struggling but unable to rise, with Pozzo screaming as if from a kilometre away "Help me"; a tawdry morass of filthy human flesh... urgh!
Strangio assembled a magnifiscent cast and facilitated a memorable interpretation of Godot - and by the way, his son Phelix provided us the necessary innocence and neutrality that the boy needs to inject.
Not often you have a night in the theatre such as that, and guess what: YOU MISSED IT!!
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