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.
No comments:
Post a Comment