Godot in Arabia

Yesterday, I attended a French production of Godot at the National Theatre-Doha. Following are my quick responses to yesterday's show:


At the outset, I say that theatre is lighting, and yesterday's "Godot" lighting was very far this, and when the moon rose towards the end of the act, lighting totally went to the dogs.

The tree is supposed to be almost bare of any leaves, but yesterday's tree was bushy, in a place where trees are anything but bushy. This is reminiscent of when in the movie "Casablanca" someone asks Humphrey Bogart about the reason that made him leave USA and come to settle in Casablanca in the African desert and Boggie says to him: "Water".

My criterion of a good play show is that once I feel that the show is a matter of people reciting lines they have memorised from a play, then the show is dead, and yesterday's show was very much like this. Theatre audiences of the world, unite and yell with me: Live theatre is no radio drama!

Again, theatre is a place where actors show their faces as if in close-ups on the television so that we enjoy looking at the beauty and aritistry of the human face, but in yesterday's show Vladimir and Estragon kept low profiles that I couldn't tell whether Estragon was a man or a woman. Nowadays, that we live in the post-modernist era, Estragon could possibly have undergone transvestism.

Pozzo, one of the best dramatic characters I admire, and, besides Hamm, Beckett's best creation, in yesterday's show was extremely disappointing, dull and undramatic

Lucky stole the entire show. I also liked the director's ad lib of making Lucky, after the tirade, chase the three characters who, including Pozzo, were intimidated by Lucky. I really enjoyed Pozzo being subdued and frightened by Lucky and I found this to be original on the director's part

After the closing dialogue exchange between Vladimir and Estragon, "Well, shall we go?"/"Yes, let's go,"the actors rushed off stage, as if the director hadn't read Beckett's final stage direction They do not move. But by missing this stage direction, the director missed a highly uncanny effective Beckettian poetic image

In addition to enjoying Lucky's performance, I was lucky in watching "Godot" in the French language, a thing that reminded me, and made me live the experience of that audience which watched the play's premiere in 1953 at the Babylon Theatre, Paris. But when I remembered Roger Blin playing Pozzo in that show, I felt a deep frustration

God bless (Beckett's parting phrase, according to James Knowlson's Beckett biography, "Damned to Fame")

Friendlily (Beckett's own closing word in his letters to Ruby Cohn, according to what Ruby told me during my visit to her in her London studio, July 2005)

Sincerely
Siddeek Tawfeek
Arab of Beckettia