Monday, 21 August 2017
Wednesday, 9 August 2017
Godot Performance - Auckland Maidment Theatre 1975
From this website:
A couple of years later, overcoming the reluctance I had long felt, I accepted a pressing invitation to direct Godot myself at the new Maidment Theatre in Auckland. This reluctance stemmed party from my reverence for the play and from my feeling I couldn’t possibly do it justice and partly from the regrettable fact of life that the cast I regarded as ideal at that time (Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Jack MacGowran and Paul Curran) never seemed available to be directed by me—especially Jack MacGowran, rest his soul. Furthermore, I was keen to correct some wrong impressions Aucklanders had about Beckett—about the Boy, and about the widely held belief that Godot audiences had to sit stolidly, respectfully, in glum silence as though listening to a Methodist sermon. In the program I put a note saying "If you find something amusing, please feel free to laugh."
The most memorable response to my production came from the critic for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation radio, Robert Goodman, who was still stuck in an ideologically committed drama groove of yore. "Beckett," he asserted on behalf of us all, "has nothing to say to us."
Godot Performance - Auckland Central Theatre 1973
Review by the New Zealand Herald:
It was a competent production, but I had to take great exception to director Raymond Hawthorne’s whimsical decision to make the Boy appear in white satin, holding a parasol aloft and doing a balancing act along a wall. I pointed out in my review that the director had not thought about the implications of this. In the first place many spectators asked, puzzled, on the way out, "Why did Beckett have that boy prancing about?" So, I jumped up and down, physically and critically, saying, "This was not Beckett’s idea at all. . . . " Since very few New Zealanders at that time had previously seen the play, the seriousness of this idiosyncrasy was far greater than it would have been in London, Paris or New York. Second, by making the Boy a fantastic, unreal, dreamlike figure, Hawthorne had operated a closure on the nature of Godot and his entourage (making them unambiguously fantastic and oneiric) that was never Beckett’s intention. In a pioneering situation directors have a particular duty to avoid such self-indulgent betrayals of the text.
He would later go on to direct his own production in Auckland at the Maidment Theatre.
Friday, 4 August 2017
Waiting For Godot Performance 1997 - Old Vic
In 1997, I directed Godot again at the Old Vic. My 16-year-old daughter was baffled by the programme material detailing the play's controversial history. "What on earth is there to understand?" she said. "It's perfectly clear what it is about. You only have to listen."
Waiting For Godot Performance - Paris 1953
QUOTES
PETER HALL (source)
The process began exactly 50 years ago, on January 5 1953, when Godot was given its first performance in a 75-seat theatre in Paris. France was where you went for radical theatre in those days. Whether it was the surrealistic images of Eugene Ionesco, the classical splendours of Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, or the political philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris continually outshone London.
And then came Samuel Beckett, soon to be recognized as the master innovator of them all. But he did not appear so at first—in fact, it took Godot several years to conquer. I heard of the play when it opened in Paris. But I am ashamed to say I did not see it. I had no idea that it would shortly dominate my life.
Godot returned theatre to its metaphorical roots. It challenged and defeated a century of literal naturalism where a room was only considered a room if it was presented in full detail, with the fourth wall removed. Godot provided an empty stage, a tree and two figures who waited and survived. You imagined the rest. The stage was an image of life passing—in hope, despair, companionship and loneliness. To our times, the images on the cinema screen are real, though they are only made of flickering light. Since Godot, the stage is the place of fantasy. Film is simile, lifelike; theatre is metaphor, about life itself.
"Why Theatre has never been the same."
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/jan/04/theatre.beckettat100
MUSIC CONCEPT
The sound fits the absurd nature, I heard one of the songs if not one quite similar
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