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I saw this play in the 1990s, but it largely faded from my memory. I had the impression of it being a difficult, entertaining and serious play. I went to see it again on 3rd August 2009, with a friend. Being right up ‘with the Gods’, the acoustic was slightly impaired and the stuffiness further befuddled my intellect. I could grasp that it was an excellent and even important piece of work, though I confessed to my friend that the full message eluded me. He wisely commented that Stoppard would be disappointed if we did grasp it all.
Since then, I have bought a copy and read it. Unlike many plays, the reading was clearer than the staged version – though the sequence of seeing the play on the stage first doubtless influences that opinion. It is so packed with clever, fizzy ideas that it is difficult to understand them from the fast, witty dialogue. On the page, one can slow down and turn back. It is a play to be highly recommended, a towering intellectual achievement, maybe (probably) a rung above ‘Copenhagen’ by Michael Frayn.
To summarise the plot of the play would take many paragraphs, and would possibly spoil it for those who have not seen or read it. Instead, it is fruitful to highlight the theme of Time.
‘Arcadia’ opens with a scene from 1809, as you can tell from the dress and language. So we are shifted back in time by 200 years. The very first line of the play, from a curious, intelligent, naïve girl called Thomasina to her tutor raises a laugh from the audience: “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” This leads into the comic, slightly farcical, country-house drama that Stoppard loves – as in ‘The real inspector Hound’. The entangled relationships and attractions are a thick thread in the tapestry of the story, running in parallel between the early 19th Century and modern times.
‘Attraction’ is a word used with care, because one of the topics they talk about is Newtonian physics and his laws of gravity. Newton’s model of the universe opens the possibility of everything being deterministic, but that is upset in human life by the life force of sex – “the attraction which Newton left out”. The human race moves forward in time and survives, thanks to sexual attraction. But in the long run we are all doomed, because of entropy, which will cause everything in the universe to “cease and grow cold”.
Time and entropy are the same thing, or at least are deeply threaded with each other. Entropy’s arrow is what makes us feel time. Thomasina understands the profound implications of entropy, destroying the neat, symmetrical world of Newtonian Physics her tutor had been teaching her: “Newton’s equations go forwards and backwards, they do not care which way. But the heat equation care very much, it goes only one way. That is the reason Mr Noakes’s engine cannot give us the power to drive Mr Noakes’s engine.”
We see time operating before our eyes on the stage, as characters from the 20th Century erupt into the same room. Now we meet ambitious academics exploring the past at Sidley Park in their various ways. One is studying the shooting records to understand the chaos-theory patterns behind the grouse population. One is writing a book about the landscape gardening and the influence of the Romantic imagination. One is researching the life of Lord Byron, hoping to come up with a scandalous, dramatic event that will make his name when published.
Time plays tricks on these searchers after truth, in that the evidence left is insufficient and misleading. Or, rather, the way they look at things causes them to bend the evidence. The University Don, Bernard, is particularly self-deluding in his eagerness to achieve fame. He convinces himself that he has found evidence of Lord Byron killing a man in a duel and fleeing the country as a result. We, the audience, already know he is barking up the wrong tree, because we have just seen the events and letters of 1809. So Bernard is not really a searcher after truth, but forms a self-serving theory first, and then imposes that theory on the evidence. He sees what he wants to see.
Time plays tricks on the earlier generation too. Thomasina Coverley also discovers the mathematics of chaos, blowing apart the neat Euclidian geometry of trianges, squares etc, with infinitely branching shapes, such as we see in nature around us – trees, for instance. The later mathematician, Valentine, has a laptop computer in which he can produce the ‘Coverley set’ – a renamed Mandelbrot set, I presume. The cruelty of time is that Thomasina (and, later, Septimus in years of scribbed mathmatics) does not have the computing power to pursue her new mathematics. She lives in the wrong age.
As Valentine says “There wasn’t enough time. There weren’t enough pencils! (He flourishes Thomasina’s lesson book.) This took her I don’t know how many days and she hasn’t scratched the paintwork. Now she’d only have to press a button over and over. Iteration. A few minutes. And what I’ve done in a couple of months, with only a pencil the calculations would take me the rest of my life to do again – thousands of pages – tens of thousands! And so boring!”
The characters from the two ages, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, take turns on the stage, with wonderful comic interactions, a supremely clever country house farce, where the two sets of characters do not talk directly with each other. However the earlier set is being observed, not only by the audience, but also by the other set of characters. The later set of characters is also silently being mocked by the earlier set, for getting their interpretations so wrong.
Towards the end, Stoppard boldly brings both ages on to the stage at the same time. The two eras end up both waltzing around the room. This is wonderful symbolism, bringing to mind the attraction of the sexes, the orbits of the planets, the whirl of atoms, the mathematics of chaos, the comedy and melancholy of human relationships….
Showing posts with label Play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Play. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
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This play tends to divide opinion. Some think it a load of boring, pretentious rot, while others venerate it as a masterpiece of modern literature. I tend to think the latter, but sometimes teeter over to the other side.
There have been several iterations reading ‘Waiting for Godot’ since school, and the latest preceded seeing it on the stage at the Haymarket Theatre on 31st July 2009. It was a brilliant production, with world-renowned actors Ian McKellen, Ronald Pickup, Simon Callow and Patrick Stewart. I found it profound and emotional.
The set coloured and illuminated in black, grey and white. It looks like a post-war bomb site. Indeed it is an extension of the theatre, with a burnt ceiling and ruined audience boxes. On the stage is a bare tree, a central emblematic focus, suggesting the power of nature, the cross, gallows and anything you care to read into it.
The play was written in late 1948, in French, and first performed in France. This is reflected in references to the Eiffel Tower, the Rhone, the Pyrenees and so forth. The chronology is clear: Estragon and Vladimir refer to their youth in the ‘Nineties’. That would be the 1890s. So they are aged approximately 58 to 68 in 1948. Pozzo also refers to having been with Lucky for ‘nearly sixty years’. So they are of a similar age, or even older.
‘Godot’ is a play about old men; no women featuring on stage or even in the dialogue. These old men are thinking about death, even hastening it by suicide (but not in a serious way). They are thinking about memory, or, rather, trying desperately to remember things with little success. They cannot even be clear about what happened yesterday. They have the mental maladies of old men. Without clear and stable memories, they are losing their sense of self. They torment themselves with time.
This drives Pozzo mad. Following Vladimir’s question “Dumb! Since when?”, he bursts out furiously: “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then its night once more.”
This passage illustrates Beckett’s richly stocked literary mind. It echoes the Book of Ecclesiastes in the bible, at least in my mind: “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing….”
There are echoes of Shakespeare reverberating behind the simple words and scenes. ‘King Lear’ comes to mind, with its wretches on the heath, as Estragon climbs out of his ditch at the beginning of each act. When Pozzo comes back blind on a short rope behind Lucky, one surely thinks of Gloucester in ‘King Lear’. One also thinks of ‘Macbeth’ in his despair and nihilism before his death meditating on “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps out this petty pace from day to day”. The four bodies lying on the floor suggest the corpses that litter the stage at the end of ‘Hamlet’ – except all these are alive. Indeed there is a play within a play, as in ‘Hamlet’, when Vladimir and Pozzo “play at Pozzo and Lucky”.
There can little doubt that Beckett was deeply influenced by the work of TS Eliot. ‘Waiting for Godot’ is almost a staged version of parts of ‘The hollow men’.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!”
One could mention the influence of James Joyce – whom Beckett personally worked with in Paris – but the main point is the richness inherent in the play.
Actually the most obvious influence is Charlie Chaplin. Here are two tramps, with tattered clothes and bowler hats. They do clownish and vaudeville things, particularly in this production, singing songs, dancing, doing a hat-exchange routine, pulling turnips from their pockets, forgetting their flies are open and dropping their trousers. They describe the audience as a ‘bog’. All this Chaplinesque clownery makes the play entertaining, and far from solemn and miserable. Indeed they strike a match against the darkness of time.
There are no answers in this play, only confused questions. There is no God (or at least no Godot), only a deep humanity. There is nowhere to go, just filling in the time here.
What will their lives amount to? Will they be remembered? Can they even remember themselves? Will Godot ever turn up, and will they recognise him when, or if, he does appear? They struggle to make an impression on the universe. A boy appears at the end of each act with a message that Godot will definitely come tomorrow (‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’), but the boy has no memory of yesterday’s message, or even if it was the same boy. Vladimir (Patrick Stewart) tries to send a message to Godot (God) and to make an impression on the boy: “Tell him… tell him you saw me and that… that you saw me. You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!”
Lucky is the most enigmatic and emblematic character in the play. He is a slave – a Caliban burdened with heavy bag, folding stool, picnic basket and a greatcoat, with a long rope around his neck. He is oppressed but not depressed – he seems to dwell mentally in another world – yet seems eager to please Pozzo. He is mute for the whole play, except for one extraordinary soliloquy, when he is ordered to ‘think’. It is a pseudo-academic declamation, but peppered with crude references, such as ‘Fartov and Belcher’. The verbal diarrhoea is deeply sonorous, turning meaningless words into a magnificent music. Perhaps he is the archetypal author, Beckett himself.
Many have interpreted and attempted to interpret this strange play, and I will go no further. However I (re-)learnt that plays in particular can be difficult read on the page, but they often come alive on the stage. Seeing and hearing this production, I would affirm this as a masterpiece of modern literature.
With the perspective of this play on my mind, I saw its themes outside the theatre. I arrived early and waited outside the Haymarket theatre. Many people were standing around waiting. They drew their counterparts closer with text and mobile phone calls. I wondered who they were waiting for. Who were they waiting for? How long would they wait? I saw many meetings and could understand what they were waiting for – their companions to see a play about waiting.
In the streets afterwards there were also figures from the play. There were tramps. There were drunks. There were people arm in arm and holding each other up. There was a man in a wheelchair. There were some chicken bones on the pavement.
This play tends to divide opinion. Some think it a load of boring, pretentious rot, while others venerate it as a masterpiece of modern literature. I tend to think the latter, but sometimes teeter over to the other side.
There have been several iterations reading ‘Waiting for Godot’ since school, and the latest preceded seeing it on the stage at the Haymarket Theatre on 31st July 2009. It was a brilliant production, with world-renowned actors Ian McKellen, Ronald Pickup, Simon Callow and Patrick Stewart. I found it profound and emotional.
The set coloured and illuminated in black, grey and white. It looks like a post-war bomb site. Indeed it is an extension of the theatre, with a burnt ceiling and ruined audience boxes. On the stage is a bare tree, a central emblematic focus, suggesting the power of nature, the cross, gallows and anything you care to read into it.
The play was written in late 1948, in French, and first performed in France. This is reflected in references to the Eiffel Tower, the Rhone, the Pyrenees and so forth. The chronology is clear: Estragon and Vladimir refer to their youth in the ‘Nineties’. That would be the 1890s. So they are aged approximately 58 to 68 in 1948. Pozzo also refers to having been with Lucky for ‘nearly sixty years’. So they are of a similar age, or even older.
‘Godot’ is a play about old men; no women featuring on stage or even in the dialogue. These old men are thinking about death, even hastening it by suicide (but not in a serious way). They are thinking about memory, or, rather, trying desperately to remember things with little success. They cannot even be clear about what happened yesterday. They have the mental maladies of old men. Without clear and stable memories, they are losing their sense of self. They torment themselves with time.
This drives Pozzo mad. Following Vladimir’s question “Dumb! Since when?”, he bursts out furiously: “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then its night once more.”
This passage illustrates Beckett’s richly stocked literary mind. It echoes the Book of Ecclesiastes in the bible, at least in my mind: “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing….”
There are echoes of Shakespeare reverberating behind the simple words and scenes. ‘King Lear’ comes to mind, with its wretches on the heath, as Estragon climbs out of his ditch at the beginning of each act. When Pozzo comes back blind on a short rope behind Lucky, one surely thinks of Gloucester in ‘King Lear’. One also thinks of ‘Macbeth’ in his despair and nihilism before his death meditating on “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps out this petty pace from day to day”. The four bodies lying on the floor suggest the corpses that litter the stage at the end of ‘Hamlet’ – except all these are alive. Indeed there is a play within a play, as in ‘Hamlet’, when Vladimir and Pozzo “play at Pozzo and Lucky”.
There can little doubt that Beckett was deeply influenced by the work of TS Eliot. ‘Waiting for Godot’ is almost a staged version of parts of ‘The hollow men’.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!”
One could mention the influence of James Joyce – whom Beckett personally worked with in Paris – but the main point is the richness inherent in the play.
Actually the most obvious influence is Charlie Chaplin. Here are two tramps, with tattered clothes and bowler hats. They do clownish and vaudeville things, particularly in this production, singing songs, dancing, doing a hat-exchange routine, pulling turnips from their pockets, forgetting their flies are open and dropping their trousers. They describe the audience as a ‘bog’. All this Chaplinesque clownery makes the play entertaining, and far from solemn and miserable. Indeed they strike a match against the darkness of time.
There are no answers in this play, only confused questions. There is no God (or at least no Godot), only a deep humanity. There is nowhere to go, just filling in the time here.
What will their lives amount to? Will they be remembered? Can they even remember themselves? Will Godot ever turn up, and will they recognise him when, or if, he does appear? They struggle to make an impression on the universe. A boy appears at the end of each act with a message that Godot will definitely come tomorrow (‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’), but the boy has no memory of yesterday’s message, or even if it was the same boy. Vladimir (Patrick Stewart) tries to send a message to Godot (God) and to make an impression on the boy: “Tell him… tell him you saw me and that… that you saw me. You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!”
Lucky is the most enigmatic and emblematic character in the play. He is a slave – a Caliban burdened with heavy bag, folding stool, picnic basket and a greatcoat, with a long rope around his neck. He is oppressed but not depressed – he seems to dwell mentally in another world – yet seems eager to please Pozzo. He is mute for the whole play, except for one extraordinary soliloquy, when he is ordered to ‘think’. It is a pseudo-academic declamation, but peppered with crude references, such as ‘Fartov and Belcher’. The verbal diarrhoea is deeply sonorous, turning meaningless words into a magnificent music. Perhaps he is the archetypal author, Beckett himself.
Many have interpreted and attempted to interpret this strange play, and I will go no further. However I (re-)learnt that plays in particular can be difficult read on the page, but they often come alive on the stage. Seeing and hearing this production, I would affirm this as a masterpiece of modern literature.
With the perspective of this play on my mind, I saw its themes outside the theatre. I arrived early and waited outside the Haymarket theatre. Many people were standing around waiting. They drew their counterparts closer with text and mobile phone calls. I wondered who they were waiting for. Who were they waiting for? How long would they wait? I saw many meetings and could understand what they were waiting for – their companions to see a play about waiting.
In the streets afterwards there were also figures from the play. There were tramps. There were drunks. There were people arm in arm and holding each other up. There was a man in a wheelchair. There were some chicken bones on the pavement.
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