Waiting for Godot (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Waiting for Godot Cóilín Parsons Waiting for Godot. By Samuel Beckett. Directed by Damon Galgut. The Little Theatre, Cape Town, South Africa. 25 May 2010. Waiting for Godot. By Samuel Beckett. Directed by Sean Mathias. The Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, South Africa. 29 July 2010. In 1937, Samuel Beckett applied for a job as a lecturer in Italian at the University of Cape Town. He was turned down on the basis that he was not a native speaker of Italian, but it is tempting to imagine how taking the job might have changed the shape of Beckett's career and of South African letters. No doubt he would have found plenty of material for his plays in the absurd and inhuman policies of the National Party, which embarked on full-scale, systematic segregation in 1948, just months before Beckett began writing Waiting for Godot. Two recent productions of Godot in Cape Town have invited audiences here to engage with Beckett as a writer of consequence to South Africa and a powerful critical voice on questions of colonialism and postcolonialism not just in Ireland, but around the world. Running within a few weeks of each other, the productions ensured that nothing happened twice—twice. By a logic of quadruple negation, something quite significant happened in the Cape Town theatre world. It was, of course, not the first significant Godot event in South Africa. A Beckett-sanctioned interracial Godot appeared at the Baxter Theatre of the University of Cape Town in 1980, fourteen years before the country's first free elections. Directed by Donald Howarth, the Godot at the Baxter has retained a certain celebrity status among productions. Howarth's insistence on the play's relevance to apartheid South Africa was a signal moment for understanding that Godot could be made to ask pressing and awkward political questions. Godot's insistent parodying of the language of human rights, enshrined in the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" during the months that Beckett wrote the play, made it particularly urgent in South Africa in the 1980s. When Pozzo determines that Vladimir and Estragon are indeed "of the same species" as himself, his affirmation is not unequivocal—he puts on his glasses in an effort to confirm the almost impossible fact. The assumption that these tramps are human beings is momentarily withdrawn until Pozzo can assure himself that this is indeed true. The end of apartheid and the sixteen years that have elapsed since the first free elections in 1994 have changed the valence of Pozzo's inquiry—the constitution has resoundingly confirmed the equal humanity of all South Africans—but the hesitancy, the momentary possibility that Pozzo might find that these tramps are not, in fact, of the same species as himself continues to make Godot a play for the times in South Africa and elsewhere. As South Africans have been learning since 1994, the long-term effects of state-engineered discrimination are difficult to overcome, even with the strongest of political wills. Both productions in Cape Town—one local, one international—made these continuing resonances with the discourse of human rights in the play very clear. The directors of both productions, Damon Galgut and Sean Mathias, are South Africans, and both appear to have felt a particular urgency in bringing this play back to what might have been its home had Beckett been offered the job in Cape Town. Galgut, a novelist whose name appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist this year for the second time, financed his production himself; Mathias and designer Stephen Brimson Lewis considerably pared down their high-profile international production in order to fit it into the space of the Fugard Theatre. Both of these productions reproduced Howarth's interracial Godot, though without the political background of 1980, the composition of the cast was neither surprising nor unusual—a fact of life in the new South Africa. And yet Beckett's play challenges us to be cognizant of the human capacity to differentiate and discriminate, so that Godot in South Africa, or any other place struggling to come to terms with colonialism, will always have echoes, however vague, of a violent past. Godot is, for...