“Waiting for Godot” according to Theodoros Terzopoulos

It is difficult today to stage fundamental theater plays in a contemporary key without betraying their essence, which often happens when free interpretation runs aground in the addition of elements aimed at setting the action in an era coeval with that of the spectator, to update the themes. On the other hand, theater is a living discipline and entrenching oneself in a hypothetical representative orthodoxy would be equally contrary to the aim of strengthening our familiarity with its highest expressions.

“Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett, directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos, Emilia Romagna production Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, Fondazione Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Bellini, in collaboration with Attis Theater Company, photo Johanna Weber

Theodoros Terzopoulos is not afraid of these traps in his version of “Waiting for Godot”, recently performed at the Teatro Arena del Sole in Bologna and now on tour in Italy and abroad. The complex nakedness of the play that Beckett wrote towards the end of the 1940s, immediately after the Second World War which saw him fighting as a partisan in the ranks of the French resistance, is here referred to a universal war context, in which the void of meaning in which the characters debate, treated as a tool to demonstrate the contradictions and tragic drifts of our present, becomes a metaphor for the absurdity of every conflict. Before the show begins, an air raid alarm alerts the audience to this assimilation, confirmed throughout the show by a soundtrack interspersed with shootings and bombings. Even the characters, from their first entrance on stage, appear as veterans of a war out of time and place: in their torn and bloody clothes we recognize both the carnival legacy of the auteur comic theater and the consequences of the irreducible malice that pits them against each other despite the impossible attempt at a meeting that animates the whole action.

For his play Beckett had imagined a bare-bones scenography, summarized by the lapidary indication: «Country road, with tree. It’s evening”. The same minimalism is found in the transposition of the Greek director, who places the actors in a scenic device of his own invention composed of four black panels arranged on two levels which, sliding in height and width, alternately reveal and hide the actors, forced to move in its narrow spaces. The structure identifies the reciprocal power relations between the characters: Vladimir and Estragon (played respectively by Stefano Randisi and Enzo Vetrano) are horizontal and equal, with their heads sometimes overlapping to compose a single two-faced being, Pozzo (Paolo Musio) is vertical in elevated position, Lucky (Giulio Germano Cervi) is buried up to his neck in a hole, while the Boy (Rocco Ancarola), who every evening announces the postponement of Godot’s coming, is lowered from above, also harnessed in a coercive apparatus, like an impotent deus ex machina, whose appearance is only provisionally decisive.

This scenography, isolating each actor in a narrow void, is a sort of theater within the theater which formalizes the inability of the characters to interact with each other, emphasizing the fact that each of them always turns to themselves even when he speaks and listens, without ever being able to understand or make himself understood. It is interesting, from an iconographic point of view, how much the structure brings to mind references to more or less recent art history, such as the brutalism of Richard Serra’s rusty steel blocks, which he dedicated to the memory of deceased friends and colleagues, to the tableaux vivant by Bill Viola, up to the perspective barriers and the dramatic lighting from the great sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings, if we think for example of the classic theme of Susanna and the elders, where the two men emerge half-length from a parapet similar to the one from which Vladimir and Estragon lean out, which in turn can be traced back to puppet theater and the comic register.

The actors, following the director’s instructions, perform without a microphone, a choice that reveals his intention to embody the question, fundamental in all of Beckett’s early prose, on language and the meaning of speaking. Great attention is therefore given to the quality of the oral execution of the playwright’s writing, in which punctuation takes on the value of a musical score, of which the pauses and accents are respected. The entire play could otherwise be read as a staging of pure language and its intrinsic ability to elaborate the variations of an apparently exhaustive initial idea (the act of waiting in vain) through the minimally varied repetition of the same opacities of the signifier, which the interpretation of the actors connotes new nuances and implications each time.

In the choral speech of the characters, the infinite delay of an end without rational finality, progressively alienating the meaning of the words, is the driving force of Beckett’s investigation into the logical and philosophical basis of speaking which, even without arriving at an outcome, gives a glimpse in the distance, as the philosopher Alain Badiou writes in Beckett: l’increvable désir (1995), to the «poetry of the inextinguishable desire to think». In the same way, the characters eliminated in all existential resources that we see motivate themselves on stage through an objective, albeit senseless, which pushes them to decide to get to the next day (discarding the idea of hanging themselves) show us how for them the postponement of purpose is a way of living, knowing, experiencing and trying to bond with others. Theodoros Terzopoulos indulges the Irish playwright’s profound love for the vital obstinacy of a humanity caught in its innate cruelty and its disarming tenderness, enhancing in his acting training the physical presence of the performers, encouraged to dig inside themselves to discover that deep down there is always a possibility, despite the tragedy of the world we live in daily seeming to confirm the definitive loss of meaning of existence.

Upcoming performances:

Concordia Theatre, San Benedetto del Tronto – 28 – 29 February 2024
Jesi Theatre, Jesi – 2 March 2024
Piccolo Teatro di Milano-Teatro D’Europa – 5 – 10 March 2024
Athens Onassis Foundation, Greece – 15 – 19 May 2024

Emanuela Zanon

Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.

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