Penelope waits for Odysseus, and Estragon and Vladimir are still Waiting for Godot in Castlemaine.
I am waiting with the opening-night audience for a play that’s as much about enduring friendship as it is about time itself. My partner sneaks a look at his watch. Wristwatches are back, apparently. What was I thinking, bringing a footy fanatic to an absurdist classic on the same night as an AFL preliminary final? But as the play begins to work its alchemy he surrenders to the precision and rhythm of Vladimir and Estragon’s bizarre double act. ‘A pause.’ ‘A silence.’ ‘A long pause.’ ‘A long silence.’
Certain works of art demand we return to them at different phases of our lives and how we remember them becomes part of our life story.
I first saw Waiting for Godot in Melbourne,1997 performed by Ireland’s Gate Theatre and directed by Walter Asmus, Beckett’s former assistant director. I was a young actor, still hopeful, still waiting for my career to begin. The renowned Barry McGovern as Vladmir was a revelation. Art could change the world!
Waiting for Godot has become so culturally ubiquitous that its title is shorthand for waiting itself. In Kath & Kim, Kath waits all day for a Telstra technician eventually transforming her waiting in limbo into art: “It’s called ‘Waiting for Telstra’… an absurdist piece.” In Seinfeld, George’s line from the famous Pitch episode: “The show is about nothing… No story… Forget the story.” is pure Godot.
But waiting is never nothing. For Homer’s Penelope, waiting is bound up with fidelity and political strategy. For Simone Weil, the French Christian philosopher, it’s a form of attention, a suspension of the will, an emptying-out in readiness to receive. Today smartphones are designed to eliminate waiting for anything. Ever. In his book On Waiting, Harold Schweizer places waiting “between hope and resignation, boredom and desire, fulfillment and futility.”
The second time I saw Godot was 2011, La Mama Theatre starring my old acting teacher, the late Bruce Kerr, and Castlemaine local John Flaus. Both men were in their late seventies and the heft and humanity of their accumulated life experience flickered and shone as they bickered and bartered whilst squinting at death and waiting for Godot. Pummeled by grief following the loss of my younger sister, I was no longer waiting for my life to begin. I’d quit acting, had left or lost my casual jobs at the university and ABC Radio, said goodbye to friends and moved to a country town with my eight-year-old son. What an earth was I waiting for now?
Fifteen years later and Castlemaine’s Ravens Theatre returns me to Godot.
Tim Heath and Gus Read-Hill are old friends who grew up in these parts and their deep connection endows the codependent and muddled Vladimir and Estragon with easy authenticity. Tim Rogers, You Am I frontman and rock icon, commands the stage as the tyrannical and flamboyant Pozzo. Luke Lennox unleashes Lucky’s legendary fragmented monologue with such startling force that the young woman sitting beside me leans forward in her seat with her hand over her mouth. Godot can still pack as discombobulating a punch in the psyche as it did over 70 years ago.
At interval, my partner is ready to walk when he learns that, famously, nothing happens in the first act and then nothing happens again in the second. ‘I like it’, he reckons. ‘But if I leave now, I can still catch the 3rd quarter.’ As a St Kilda supporter, he’s used to waiting, to eking out hope amid the universe’s apparent indifference to his suffering. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Saints fans rely on each other to validate their existence. One unofficial Saints T-shirt reads: Just One Before I Die.
Walking home after the show, I pass the fire station, now a café, the old bank building, now a real estate agency, and down the railway underpass. I spot a few people from tonight’s audience waiting on the Castlemaine station platform. I’m reminded of the recent essay by David Warren, Beckett in Blackpool, describing the rocky and uneven reception Godot received during its premiere in Britain in 1955. When the play went on tour to the provinces Blackpool’s audience was so unimpressed the cast decided to cut all of Becketts mandatory pauses so they could make it in time to catch the last train back to London after the show. The play lost 20 minutes.
Vladimir and Estragon may exist in a bleak landscape and been waiting forever for Godot, but they are not waiting alone. They wait with each other and it’s the very presence of the other that allows them to create meaning and moments of joy, however circular and absurd their storytelling. Beckett’s characters are constantly losing track of the who, where, what and why of their situation but like Estragon says, “always find something… to give us the impression we exist. “They moan and blame, skit and canter to pass the time.
Tonight, Godot’s tramps are me and my mum during her final year – the constant need for reassurance, the arguments, the jokes, the complaining, the boredom. The love.
I arrive home and my partner is waiting for me. The footy is on the telly with the sound turned down. Godot has always been a play about waiting as much as it is about living with the not-knowing. Who knows what I am waiting for next.