[D66] Godot banned in Guantámano

[Oto]

  'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett

November 10, 2014

By David Leveaux

>From the column 'The Banned Books of Guantánamo'
<http://www.vice.com/en_uk/series/the-banned-books-of-guantanamo>

/​ "To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still
ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all
mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it
before it is too late!" – Vladimir: Waiting for Godot/

When, earlier this year, British minister for Justice Chris Grayling ​
sought to prevent
<http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2014/03/23/comment-why-has-grayling-banned-prisoners-being-sent-books>books
being sent to prisoners, he covered his tracks by arguing that it was to
stop drugs or weapons being smuggled in with them. But the significance
of one of the world's oldest democracies apparently getting into the
book-banning business seemed to be lost on him. In fact, the idea was so
incandescently stupid that I briefly considered the possibility that
there had been a similar, if unannounced, ban on sending books to
politicians.

Of course, the stupidity was entirely mine.

If instinctive liberalism has one arterial flaw, it is its optimism. And
in this case, I was entirely wrong to imagine that anyone fortunate
enough to have the education and opportunities of a politician like
Grayling would naturally arrive, by force of gravity alone, in orbit
around the great planet Common Sense.

For instance: we know you can burn books, or ban them. Better still, and
for the sake of convenience, you can ban /and/ burn their authors. But
history teaches that their words will out nonetheless. And if those
words are useful they will even endure. This is not a recent discovery.
But it's a truth that needs to be repeatedly re-learned.

It's an old trick of politicians to pretend to be anti-intellectual, as
if that is a guarantee that they have their finger on the pulse of
"real" people. It's bullshit of course, and a cynical play to the
gallery of demagoguery. But it has consequences.

Five days after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 I received a call from
Bertolt Brecht's daughter Barbara to tell me that the graves of her
parents in the Jewish cemetery on Friedrichstrasse, in the former East
Berlin, had been defaced with spray-paint that read "Jewish Intellectual
Pigs". She told me it was like 1930 all over again.

Artists and intellectuals are regularly maligned as somehow separated
from real life. So when it comes to revolution they are often among the
first to be dispensed with.

But the underlying contradiction in the official view of artists as
inherently away with the fairies is instantly exposed when you consider
the books that governments (or institutions acting in their name) feel
it necessary to ban. And in that list, Samuel Beckett's /Waiting for
Godot/, first performed in French in 1953, holds a peculiarly consistent
position.

I say "peculiarly" because, on the face of it, /Waiting for Godot/ is
one of the most iconically incomprehensible plays of the modern era.

Wikipedia tags it as an "absurdist" drama, which is literati code for
"don't expect to be as entertained by this as you might be by /Diehard/.
But it's art." It's a play that your average theatre critic professes to
admire in the way a hiker admires a bear while considering how best to
retreat from it.

It is, in other words, apparently the supreme example of a literature
that might have been the province of a few dedicated esoterics operating
in the stratosphere of philosophical speculation; with a limited art
house audience to match.

And yet /Waiting for Godot/ not only endures profoundly in the public
imagination, it has earned the improbable accolade of being banned in –
among other places – the former East German Republic and the United
States' detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.

In 1984, Samuel Beckett came to London to direct a production of the
play at Riverside Studios. I was then a young director assigned to the
task of looking after anything he needed in or around rehearsal, which
wasn't much: a half of Guinness at lunch time, and some help managing
the newfangled push button phones that were replacing the old rotary
dial ones in the offices.

These new phones were a source of wry bewilderment to him, and on one
occasion provided for a startling moment of Beckettian comedy while he
was trying to make a call to Paris. He finally gave up on the fancy
buttons in sheer incomprehension, and tossed the entire plastic
contraption off my desk and into the bin.

In return, I had the great fortune to sit around and watch him direct in
that distinctive and discreetly influential style that depended less on
him saying anything than it did on the actors being aware to their nerve
endings that he didn't miss a thing. Moreover, and here was the clue,
there was nothing abstract about his advice to the actor. Not a word
about metaphors or meanings or themes, only the gently firm injunction
to "look up there" or to be clear on a word or a phrase.

But one of the reasons there was so little need for discussion about the
play – apart from Sam's temperamental aversion to discussing his plays
anyway – was the very special nature of the acting company he was
directing and the remarkable bond they had with Beckett.

This was The San Quentin Drama Workshop, headed up by actor and writer
Rick Cluchey.

Rick's first exposure to the play in 1957 was actually through hearsay.
He was serving a life sentence in San Quentin State prison for armed
robbery, and was being held in a secure unit on the night a touring
company came to the prison to perform /Waiting for Godot/. The effect of
the play on those who did see it was evidently electrifying enough for a
cellmate to describe the entire thing to Rick and spark what would
become a lifelong commitment not only to the theatre but to the work of
Samuel Beckett.

As a result of that performance, and the ground-breaking work that
followed at San Quentin involving prisoners creating and performing
theatre, by the time Rick was paroled in 1966 the foundations for the
San Quentin Drama Workshop had been established. And Rick had developed
a close relationship with Beckett himself.

Now, in 1984, in the wide spaces of Riverside Studio One, the forlornly
purposeless purpose of those two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting
for something that may never come, and the monstrous Pozzo driving on
the tortured, defeated, de-humanized creature so perfectly named Lucky
seemed, through the lens of these former convict collaborators, to be a
natural revelation. Even the illuminated fire escape sign that was ever
present at the rear of the space seemed to acquire an unforced wit –
there is of course no escape from this landscape for the two inhabitants
of the play that famously ends thus: **/
**/

/*VLADIMIR: *Well? Shall we go?
**/

/*ESTRAGON:* Yes, let's go./

/[They do not move]/

It may be trite to argue that the play has special meaning as a metaphor
for the despair and paralysis experienced by the incarcerated – even
though /Godot/ gave notice of its intimacy with prisoners almost from
the beginning, when Beckett agreed, in 1953, to a request from inmates
at Wuppertal prison in Germany to let them translate and perform it there.

And anyway, the metaphor alone could surely not explain why the play
attracts the beady eye of censors operating in the name of such diverse
and, you might think, opposed ideologies as that of the Marxist East
German Republic and the United States.

I believe the key to this question is that the play is not a metaphor at
all. It is, as far as political expedience is concerned, something far
more worrying: namely, life itself.

To understand that, I think it's necessary to understand the deep
purpose of censorship, which at its core is actually identical to the
purpose of the Berlin Wall or the facility at Guantánamo.

And that purpose, as I came to understand it, is isolation.

Following the revelation of Beckett's radically warm and funny
production at Riverside Studios, I was to find myself, a couple of years
later, directing his play /Krapp's Last Tape/ in East Berlin. The
production was chiefly notable for two things: it starred one of the
great actors of the Berliner Ensemble, Ekkehard Schall, who was also
Bertolt Brecht's son-in-law, and the play, along with the rest of
Beckett's writing, had up to that point been banned in East Germany.

The fact that it was possible to do it at all owed as much to the widely
held affection and esteem for Ekkehard and the Brecht family in East
Berlin, as it did to the stealthily influential effect of Mikhail
Gorbachev's ascendancy in Moscow.

As we rehearsed, there was no sense of making some kind of "radical"
statement with the play, or of bending it towards an earnest analysis of
– or metaphor for – the state of East Germany. Nothing could have been
further from our minds. In fact, if I thought anything along these lines
it was only to celebrate the fact that the bar of censorship had been
lifted and an East German audience would have the opportunity to
experience this giant of a dramatist first-hand.

I was wrong.

The day before we opened, the brilliant dramaturg who had been working
alongside us with shared enthusiasm and passion for the adventure,
proudly arrived with the programme for the show, which she had been
preparing for weeks. And the dominant article in that programme was a
lengthy essay by a Professor of Humboldt University explaining how
interesting it was to compare Beckett – apparently a fine chronicler but
also a product of "capitalist despair" – with the progressive energy of
Brecht and other Socialist writing.

I was appalled at what I took to be a flagrant attempt to intervene
between dramatist and audience – offering a wholly specious "lens"
through which people were invited to view the play. It was as if an
alternate world had been offered to replace the real one. I insisted on
writing a counter-article, only to be told, of course, that the
programme had already been printed so it was too late.

As it turned out, and largely thanks to Ekkehard, a compromise was
reached whereby my piece could be typed up and "slipped" on a separate
sheet into the programme. (With almost comic consequences none of us had
considered, this solution turned out to be hugely to my advantage. My
piece was on a loose sheet of paper in a glossy programme, which should
have demoted its significance. But since a loose sheet of paper falling
out of a programme is invariably the first thing people glance at, it
had precisely the opposite effect – an accidental illustration of
censorship's own arterial flaw: that it invariably, if unintentionally,
draws more attention to the thing censored.)

That encounter with an admittedly subtle kind of censorship left a huge
impression on me because I realised that it was an attempt to withhold
not just some inconvenient facts, but reality itself. This is, of
course, a technique of isolation, deployed for the purpose of making us
dependent on the worldview of its proponents. And we can bet that its
practitioners in Guantánamo today are astonishingly advanced in their
understanding of it.

But, you might well ask, what is so special – or real – about a reality
like the one Beckett illuminates across his barren landscapes, populated
by his tortured clown-souls? Why is that reality desirable enough to be
worth banning?

The answer to this lies partly in Rick Cluchey's cellmate's account of
that 1957 performance of /Godot/. After all, he had just witnessed a
play that portrayed paralysis, hopelessness, hope, cruelty, humiliation,
irrational bursts of joy and rage – a stopped and futile clock of sheer
fury transformed into an endless present tense of astonishing beauty.
But these outrages of experience were not expressed as a special hell
set aside only for the rejected or the spurned in our world. They were
expressed as the general condition of humanity itself.

That prisoner in San Quentin, watching Beckett's play unfold in front of
him, might have been astonished to find that he had been cast in a
leading role. For a moment, he might have felt himself to be part of
humanity, not separated from it.

One lunchtime at Riverside, a man with wild hair and an evangelical
demeanour came through the doors and headed straight over to where Sam
was sitting with his half of Guinness. The man was visibly nervous, but
finally said: "Mr Beckett, I've been reading your work for 40 years."
Then he stopped, at a loss. Sam eventually looked up from his Guinness
and said: "You must be very tired." It was a gentle, faintly teasing,
and typically reductive joke.

Beckett's miraculous ability was to reduce all description until he
reached the thing described. He punctured the over-inflated tyres of
false sentiment, vanity and grandiloquence. He resolutely rejected a
"lovelier" version of the world than the one he found, not, I believe,
because he wanted to peddle despair but because by staring unblinking
into the shadowless ruins of his own lethal century, littered with the
violated and dead of our species, he could detect a song where no song
had seemed possible.

I don't know the explicit reason that /Waiting for Godot/ is on the list
of banned books at Guantánamo. But perhaps it's because, somewhere at
the core of the play's enduring and insurgent beauty, it possesses the
same quality Sam once ascribed to one of his favourite rugby players –
that he was "capable of genius when the light is dying".

/David Leveaux is a theatre director and five-time Tony award nominee.
Header Image by Marta Parszeniew <http://twitter.com/martaparszeniew>
/

/http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/waiting-for-godot-by-samuel-beckett-david-leveaux-107
/

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