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<h1> <span>'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett</span> </h1>
<div class="meta-information"> <span class="publish-time"
data-publish-date="2014-11-10 10:00:00+00:00"
data-publish-date-format="MMMM D, YYYY">November 10, 2014</span>
</div>
<div class="contributor-info">
<p class="contributor-full-name"> <span>By</span> David
Leveaux </p>
</div>
<div class="column-title"> From the column <a
href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/series/the-banned-books-of-guantanamo">'The
Banned Books of Guantánamo'</a> </div>
</div>
</header>
<p class="has-image"> <img
src="cid:part2.00040200.02010505@ziggo.nl" alt=""></p>
<p><em>
"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</em></p>
<p> When, earlier this year, British minister for Justice Chris
Grayling <a
href="http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2014/03/23/comment-why-has-grayling-banned-prisoners-being-sent-books"
target="_blank">sought to prevent </a>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.</p>
<p> Of course, the stupidity was entirely mine.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> For instance: we know you can burn books, or ban them. Better
still, and for the sake of convenience, you can ban <em>and</em>
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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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 <em>Waiting for Godot</em>, first performed in French
in 1953, holds a peculiarly consistent position.</p>
<p> I say "peculiarly" because, on the face of it, <em>Waiting for
Godot</em> is one of the most iconically incomprehensible plays
of the modern era.</p>
<p> 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 <em>Diehard</em>. 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> And yet <em>Waiting for Godot</em> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> This was The San Quentin Drama Workshop, headed up by actor and
writer Rick Cluchey.</p>
<p> 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 <em>Waiting
for Godot</em>. 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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: <strong></strong><em><br>
<strong></strong></em></p>
<p> <em><strong>VLADIMIR: </strong>Well? Shall we go?<br>
<strong></strong></em></p>
<p> <em><strong>ESTRAGON:</strong> Yes, let's go.</em></p>
<p> <em>[They do not move]</em></p>
<p> 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 <em>Godot</em> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> And that purpose, as I came to understand it, is isolation.</p>
<p> 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 <em>Krapp's Last Tape</em> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> I was wrong.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.)</p>
<p> 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. <br>
</p>
<p> 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?</p>
<p> The answer to this lies partly in Rick Cluchey's cellmate's
account of that 1957 performance of <em>Godot</em>. 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> I don't know the explicit reason that <em>Waiting for Godot</em>
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".</p>
<p> <em>David Leveaux is a theatre director and five-time Tony
award nominee. Header Image by <a
href="http://twitter.com/martaparszeniew">Marta Parszeniew</a><br>
</em></p>
<p><em><a
href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/waiting-for-godot-by-samuel-beckett-david-leveaux-107">http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/waiting-for-godot-by-samuel-beckett-david-leveaux-107</a><br>
</em></p>
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