Samuel Beckett’s great workWaiting for Godot“, presented for the first time in Roof of the Onassis Foundationfrom May 15 to 19, with the seal of the international Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos and an outstanding Italian cast, in a major co-production by Emillia Romagna Teatro that is on world tour.
“Nothing is more real than nothing” said Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and with Waiting for Godot (1948) he 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”. This eternal waiting is directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos in terms of comic-tragic liturgy. 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 in Makrygialos, Pieria and has been traveling the world for forty years with the Attis theater, teaching his wonderful method of acting from Asia to Australia, “reveals a crucified humanity, whose nails they are words” as the foreign publications note, to end up with the quote: “a show that will be written in the annals of modern theater”.
Theodoros Terzopoulos notes: “Our performance is placed 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”?
News today:
Freddy Beleris: 30 years of persecution by the Albanian regime
End of Survivor for Gentsoglou, disaster with Stavroula and Giannis – Watch video
Ataman: If we don’t go to the Final Four, I won’t be in Panathinaikos next year – Video
