I think that is very much the case with GODOT. I guess that seems a little obvious, but really, if the playwright is good, everything you really need should already be in the script. Where exactly do you drop an anchor and pick a point to work outward from?įirst, my job as the actor is to focus on the text I am given and to make as many decisions as possible based on the basic information contained therein. No matter how you choose to play it, he simply does odd things in odd ways, and I found it intimidating to consider how to make sense of it all how to chart a set of choices for my performance. Though Beckett provides great detail about the manner of their entrance - how they are tied, what they are wearing, what they are carrying - he provides no specifics about either man’s physical appearance, where they come from, or quite exactly where they are going.įurther, Pozzo then embarks upon a series of odd behaviors and assertions, which sometimes seem inspired by his exchanges with Didi and Gogo, and sometimes spool out almost randomly, in stream-of-consciousness-like fashion: His cruel treatment of Lucky, his claim that he owns the land Didi and Gogo are waiting upon, his inability to sit down without somehow being invited to do so by someone else, the fact that the objects in his pockets continue to disappear later in the scene, etc., etc., etc… We first meet him at the “master” end of a long rope whose “servant” end is tied around Lucky’s neck. Pozzo, (being my current example), is presented in the text of GODOT with scant few details about his personal history or existence. Beckett takes a familiar thing that we might take for granted, and sets that familiar thing in an unfamiliar place, which then makes it possible to evaluate all of it in a whole new way. And that distortion is, one assumes, the point. All the pieces would still be there, but scattered and rearranged into something different. He turns a rather fractured mirror back onto the world, such that if you stand close to the glass you would be able to recognize the gently broken image of yourself, but the larger room (or world) beyond you would be so distorted by the cracks and fissures, that its familiarity would be much harder to seize hold of. ![]() The “absurdist” genre that Beckett wrote in – though, yes, “defined” is possibly more accurate – is a space beyond the familiar rules of our daily existence. My piece to dissect: Pozzo, the narcissistic, slave-owning traveler, who interrupts and visits with the play’s two main characters, Didi and Gogo for a chunk of each act, accompanied by his “menial,” Lucky. I’ve recently had the pleasure/dismay of gazing once again into that particular abyss while working on WAITING FOR GODOT at the Quintessence Theatre Group. ![]() But when you’re an artist working on creating that whole, it’s your job to dissect the pieces - or at least YOUR piece - and therein awaits a certain abyss. BUT: As a person occasionally (partly) responsible for helping to create those experiences… there I’m afraid I’m at a loss.īeckett, it is said, works best when you watch his plays without trying to dissect the elements of them when you allow the sum of the pieces to wash over you as a whole.
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