Theodoros Terzopoulos is “waiting” for Godot in Stegi

Waiting for Godot: Monumental, on the border of high poetry and impudent comedy. The direction of his masterpiece text Samuel Beckett signed by the most international Greek theater director, o Theodoros Terzopoulos, directing an outstanding Italian cast, in a major co-production of Emillia Romagna Teatro currently on world tour. And all this just before we see in Ancient theatre of Epidavros her Oresteia under his own directorial perspective.

“Nothing is more real than nothing” had stated Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and with the Waiting for Godot (1948) hurls this “nothing” onto the stage like a meteorite. Because nothing remarkable, in terms of action and plot, happens in this work of the Nobel Prize-winning Irish thinker, poet and writer. Two street outcasts, two clozars, Vladimir and Estragon, dressed in their rags, standing by a tree, talking about winds and waters, randomly meeting three equally strange guys, while basically waiting for someone else who never comes . Who, after all, is the Godot of the title who never appears? Some savior or even God himself, as the corruption of the name in English shows (Godot, from God = God)? Beckett has, however, admitted that what interested him was not so much Godot as “waiting”.

Theodoros Terzopoulos and “Waiting for Godot”

This eternal waiting is staged in terms of a comic-tragic liturgy by o Theodoros Terzopoulos. In his performance, a black scaffold, like a funeral monument, stands on stage. A cross of light tears it in two. At its base, a tiny bonsai. Church hymns, tangos, bombings and war sirens resound. There, like figures brought to life from some unknown ancient zoophoros, lie waiting Vladimir and Estragon, played by veteran Sicilian actors Enzo Vetrano and Stefano Randisi. They play their roles with the insane wisdom and holy desperation of Buster Keaton. Figures capricious and contradictory, witty as well as naïve, airily waiting statically and ecstatically for the one who will never come to save them from the ontological impasse of existing always expecting something.

The show by Terzopoulos, the director who started from Makrygialos in Pieria and has been touring the world for forty years with Attis Theatre, teaching his wondrous method of acting from Asia to Australia, “reveals a crucified humanity, whose nails are words” as noted by foreign publications, to conclude with the quote: “a performance that will be written in the annals of modern theater” .

O Theodoros Terzopoulos reports: “Our show is set in the ‘ruins of the world’, in a future, more or less, close to us, where all the wounds of the present and the past remain open. So are expectations… At this end of human existence, what are the minimum possible conditions for restarting life, a life worth living? In Waiting for Godot there are two possible answers and that is where we base our work:

The first is the effort to communicate and co-exist with the Other, the one who is in front of us, despite any obstacles, even when they seem insurmountable!

The second is the effort to communicate with the Other within us, with that unfathomable and dark region of repressed desires and fears, of forgotten senses and instincts, the region of the animal and the divine, where madness and dream are born, the delirium and the nightmare. This is the journey we have tried to make: towards the Other within us and towards the Other outside us, opposite, away from us. Waiting for what? The Redemption of life from the bonds of death? The meeting with the Man? The end of all humiliation of man by man? Nothing or Waiting, as Beckett quips? But is there another way to envision the emancipated man, without tearing down the walls that separate the “inside” from the “outside”?

The Waiting for Godot in his direction, set design, lighting and costumes Theodoros Terzopoulos, a great show and a priceless gift for the Greek audience who rarely have the opportunity to watch an international production by the Greek director for a theater abroad. The show makes a stop at the Onassis Foundation Roof, while it has already excelled with rave reviews in over 20 Italian cities and will continue its international tour from China to Bulgaria, from Hungary to Romania.