Feb. 01, 2012 - Issue #850: Godot

Mad, mad world

Wishbone Theatre brings Beckett back to town

Until Sat, Feb 11 (8pm)
Waiting for Godot
Directed by Chris Bullough
Arts Barns, Westbury Theatre, $19 –$23
 

We're living in a time when the well-established conventions about how we should co-exist feel ready to pull apart at the seams. The answers we've found for systems to sustain us—the political parties that represent our interests, the economic structures that supposedly safeguard our finances, the social progress that seems to slowly be grinding to a halt—each feels increasingly archaic in structure, like once-good-ideas in need of re-evaluation. Look to the Arab Spring, or, closer to home, to the Occupy camps that dotted cities in North America: uncertainty's in the air, and the lack of a clear path forward might exactly be the reason that, slowly but surely, Samuel Beckett is starting to creep back into the theatre.

"You start to see the Broadway play, you start to see articles about him in the paper more. Maybe it's because we're steeped in it that we're hearing more about it, but for me, he's refreshing in that there's no artifice—He's just laying it all out on the table," explains Chris Bullough, director of Wishbone Theatre's Waiting for Godot, the first mainstage production of the play to happen in Edmonton for almost 40 years. 

"I feel like half the population's going—or some would argue 99 percent of the population is going—'Something's broken,'" Bullough continues. "Something is very, very wrong.  And I think more and more people are coming to that conclusion and actually want to do something about it. And I think Beckett offers truth. He starts at a place where other writers barely even get to. He's looking into the truth of what our human experience is, and I think there's something refreshing about that. And I think in a time when we're frustrated with our economic system and our political system and we feel like we can't get anywhere.  I feel like ... "

"... Everyone's waiting for change," finishes Nathan Cuckow. The pair are sitting side by side in a boardroom at the Arts Barns, and together, despite plenty of performance history, they appear a mismatched pair—Bullough clean-shaven in a blue, collared button-up, Cuckow sporting a scruffy character beard, a Sonic Youth t-shirt and his costume bowler hat still perched on his head from rehearsal.

A Beckett script like Godot fits snugly into the the mandate of Bullough's Wishbone Theatre, a young company that he co-runs with Michael Peng (who's on designer detail for the production): in part, the company's looking to program classical works in a smaller setting than the usual, Citadel-sized stages we'd see them at around town (if we'd see them at all). Wishbone made the jump from Fringe company to programming a season of its own this past fall , starting with a remount of their fringe hit Bashir Lazhar and following it up with the magical realism of Falling: A Wake. As far as classics go, Godot makes sense for an indie company, eager to prove itself, to stage: it's a small cast, but one that demands serious acting chops from everyone involved.

"It's one of the few classical pieces that you can do in the independent theatre canon, [and] try and accomplish it the way it was intended to be produced," Bullough says. "As opposed to Shakespeare, where you're probably going to cross-cast five or six parts, and cut it. This is the play in its entirety with everybody playing one role."

Cuckow notes that a Beckett figure wasn't exactly a bucketlist role he was waiting to play, but one that he's found his own connection with as the rehearsal process has gone along.

"I really didn't know the play that well, outside of having read it in school 100 years ago," Cuckow says, noting he got involved quite simply because Bullough asked him to. "It's not exactly the first thing that would come to mind as something that I would really want to do, so the challenge for me was figuring out where I connect, and learning to love what it is. Because it's not everyone's cup of tea, Beckett. It's very different. So I spent my time trying to learn how I could love this thing, and why I would want to do it. Why should an audience come watch this story? What would, I feel, make an audience connect to this story? That's been part of my journey."
 

Sensible for a small company to stage or not, Beckett's still a riddle of a playwright, and Godot is perhaps his most open-to-interpretation puzzler. What plot there is concerns two hapless bums, Estragon and Vladmir, stuck doing the titular waiting. Emotions flare up, even as no real progress is made; eventually, another pair of bizarre vagabonds enter, but they only further complicate the stalled proceedings. Then, when act two starts the whole thing begins anew: more waiting. It's a play where, if you go by a written synopsis, nothing happens. And given that Beckett's scripts have swung more into the canon of literary study than regular theatrical stagings in the past few decades, that's often how they're read—for the intangibles, an approach that saps some of Beckett's power, in searching for a definitive meaning.

"This is a play that academia has really embraced, and studied, and intellectualized to a point where it almost becomes inhuman. You know what I mean?" Bullough asks. "You're just breaking it down into so small parts, and into idioms, and philosophies.

So it's a daunting show to stage, to say the least, not only for hooking an audience on that trying premise but for the performers charged to wring humanity out of characters that seem trapped on the very cusp of it. Here, Bullough and co have tried to carve their own path through the possibilities of what this could be. Part of the answer, it turns out, is that such existential anguish is really fucking funny.

"I remember the day I discovered it was a comedy," Bullough says, prompting a chuckle from Cuckow. "That was a huge breakthrough for me. it was like, 'Ooh, thank God this is a comedy.' And then you start to see it. You start to see the comedy on the page. And then when [to Cuckow] you guys are bringing your own humanity to it, it's even funnier."

"It's really their struggle," Cuckow adds. "It just comes down to these two people who just are filled with struggle, life being such a struggle, and trying to rise about it. And then get[ting] pulled back down into it. "

Bullough groans. "But who would want to come and watch that?"

On paper, Beckett really is a tough sell. But he's also a playwright who engineered the live power of his scripts. A Beckett script is as much about what goes unsaid, alluded to but left lingering on the periphery, making this a rare glance to see one on its feet, to see how Beckett intended his work to be seen:  directing a group of eyes to the places where the world seems to be tearing then, and letting you do what you want with that information.

"It's a very different kind of thing that, at the end of the day, really does tap into what great plays do," Cuckow says. "Whether it's in a modern context or a classical context, whatever it is, it's to tap into the core of humanity and the core of human existence. The best kind of theatre is the theatre that entertains you, can make you laugh, can make you have a good time, but can also plant an idea, or make you question something, or just challenge you in an intellectual way. And I feel like this play does that."

"It just asks all the giant questions that most people aren't interested in examining when you're doing your everyday life" Bullough says. "And it's pretty brilliant, what Beckett's done: he's saying, 'Come to the theatre for a night of entertainment,' and at the same time, underneath it all is boiling. The silences, they're pregnant with these big questions." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus