Beckett was drawn back to Godot

He didn't approve of them all, but the many incarnations of Beckett's favourite child are testament to its wide-ranging appeal and endurance, writes Belinda McKeon

Samuel Beckett wrote En Attendant Godot between October 1948 and January 1949. In the space of four months, he had produced what would come to be regarded as perhaps the most innovative and most influential play of the 20th century. It would be a full four years before Godot - hawked around Paris like an orphaned child, and rejected by one producer after another - would see the stage.

Beneath a tree of coat hangers, and in the light of projectors built from old metal cans, Vladimir and Estragon commenced their wait at the little Théâtre de Babylone in Montparnasse. Beckett, who had attended every rehearsal, was not present on that first night: "Don't hold it against me for having stayed away," he wrote to the director Roger Blin from his retreat in Ussy, 30 miles east of Paris. "I couldn't take any more."

It was a sentiment that Beckett was to reiterate many times over the next 35 years, as he watched Godot after Godot take to stages around the world; on more than one occasion, involvement with productions of the play led him to declare that he was finished with the theatre. "To have to listen to these words day after day has become torture," he wrote of the play in 1974. But this was the year in which he first directed the play himself, in Berlin, and for him the end result was every bit as exhilarating as it was exhausting; his red notebook contained everything he wanted to do with the play, and in this production, he came close to that dream. In spite of - perhaps because of - the heartscald it caused him, Beckett was drawn back to Godot, again and again. If it had seemed an orphan in its earliest days, in its maturity it was revealed as its author's favourite child - complex, troublesome, and completely irresistible.

Near the end of his life, even as he claimed he was too old and too low in spirits, to put his heart into the task of co-directing a new production of the play, Beckett was moved to tears by an actor's performance of Lucky's monologue. If Godot tortured him, it was only because it mattered to him so dearly.
Had Beckett been present at the first performances in the Babylone, he would have heard that same monologue greeted with mocking hoots and whistles, would have seen irate audience members either storming out or coming to blows with those who supported the play. Godot was a shock to the system of theatre, and the controversy which leaped up around its strangeness and its starkness boosted its popularity enormously; new box office records were set at a theatre which had previously been on the verge of closing down.

Requests for the English-language rights came pouring in soon afterwards, and, alarmed by the prospect of others tampering with his words, Beckett himself translated the play for Barney Rosset, a New York publisher, in June of that year. The first English-language production was staged, under the direction of Peter Hall, at a London theatre club in August 1955. The venue of a club was chosen in order to dodge the wrath of the lord chamberlain, the censor and licensee of plays, who had demanded that several cuts be made to the script, including the word "erection" and most of Lucky's speech.
The first-night audience was rowdy and bewildered, shouting at the actors and leaving in droves, and early reviews were of the hatchet-job variety, pronouncing the play tedious and superficial. But two intelligent reviews - by Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson - shifted thinking on the play, and it transferred to the Criterion Theatre soon afterwards. Here, in a public theatre, the cuts had to be observed, and partly to protest at this, Beckett stayed away from London until persuaded to attend the productions by Alan Schneider, who wanted to direct the first American Godot.

Schneider got his wish the following January, but soon afterwards must have wished otherwise; the American premiere of Godot was a disaster. Audiences had been primed for a farcical comedy starring two giants of that genre, Bert Lahr (formerly the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz) and Tom Ewell, and reacted blankly to the darkness of Beckett's humour. The Miami venue was unsuitable, the set was cluttered, and Schneider, afterwards, was desolate - though Beckett, regarding the whole affair with detached amusement, assured him that, in mounting a deeply unpopular play, he had perhaps come closest to stating the true nature of Godot. Somewhat amazingly, a Broadway run followed, but with another director, and with a publicity campaign aimed squarely at the New Yorker demographic; "Seventy thousand intellectuals" were appealed to in an advertisement, and the run turned out to be a huge success. It also made Beckett richer than he had ever before been.

THE DUBLIN PRODUCTION of Godot had to wait until after the London premiere, and Alan Simpson, who staged the play eventually at the Pike Theatre in Herbert Lane, was warned by Beckett that "certain crudities of language" in the play would most probably render it impossible to perform in Ireland. However, Dublin audiences had been prepared for the shock of Godot by reviews of the London production, and reviews, while scolding Beckett for his pessimism, were generally favourable, though the Evening Herald commented that he was merely trying to out-Joyce Joyce. The play had a successful run of more than 100 performances and transferred to the Gate.

However, Beckett was irked with Simpson for changing the opening line of the play from "Nothing to be done" to "Nothing doing".
This lasting grudge, combined with a general wariness of his native country and an apparent dislike of the actor Peter O'Toole, made for a furious reaction on Beckett's part to the news that an Abbey Theatre production of Godot was to be staged, without his consent, in 1969. His agents had granted the licence, and he was unhappy; he limited the run to a month and refused to allow the Abbey to add the play to its repertoire. Afterwards, he took satisfaction in hearing from a friend that the Abbey run (with O'Toole as Vladimir and Donal McCann as Estragon) was "appalling and O'Toole-ridden beyond belief".

The productions of Godot Beckett was happier to hear about were those that took place in unconventional venues, which challenged cultural and social mores; the huge success of his play in prison environments gave him real joy. From the 1950s on, when a German prisoner first got wind of the play that was the talk of Paris, acquired a copy, and translated it and staged a production himself, Godot was performed in prisons across Europe and the US, and Beckett took a deep interest in the responses of the inmates.

After seeing Godot in the penitentiary at San Quentin, California in 1957, prisoners speaking to reporters showed an understanding of the play far superior to that of most critics. Rick Cluchey, an audience member at that performance, was so moved by the play that he went on to form a theatre troupe within the prison, staging Godot and other Beckett plays on the site of the gallows, and on his release he formed a Beckett-focused drama workshop and became very close to Beckett himself, who treated him almost like a son.

OVER THE YEARS, the play exerted a strong pull on artists and audiences, who empathised with the monotonous entrapment in which Vladimir and Estragon existed. A production in communist Poland in 1957 expressed, for those who saw it, a desperate hope for escape from Russian rule; for the audience in French-occupied Algeria, Godot was the promise of land reform, long-desired and never arriving.

In 1970s Melbourne, the play channelled a longing and suffering that related closely, and uncomfortably, to the plight of displaced aboriginal peoples. In 1993, the writer and intellectual Susan Sontag directed local actors in a production at the youth theatre in Sarajevo, quite literally in the middle of a war zone; the theatre was cluttered with debris from an earlier bombing, the stage was lit by candles, and actors and audience members had to walk through sniper fire to get to the play.

Godot may, indeed, have worked most brilliantly in prisons, but imprisonment took many varieties. And one of the productions in which Beckett became most deeply invested in a personal sense took place in South Africa, during a period of particularly bad political turbulence. Beckett despised the policy of apartheid in South Africa, and had ruled that his plays could only be performed in non-segregated theatres. There had at this stage been at least two all-black productions of Godot, one in Johannesburg in 1962 and one on Broadway five years earlier; Beckett had been vociferously excited about the latter, writing to a friend that it was his "best news". But in 1976, the young director of a new, mixed-race Johannesburg troupe wrote to Beckett's agent requesting permission to stage Godot as its debut production. The cast was intended to be multi-racial, as was the audience, and Beckett consented, but the cast turned out eventually to be entirely black and the scanty audiences almost entirely white, due to the great risk involved for black people in attending the production.
A much more successful South African Godot took place in Cape Town in 1980, with a mixed-race cast, which in itself made a powerful political statement; Vladimir and Estragon were black, played by two actors who had recently been arrested for their performances in an anti-apartheid piece, while Pozzo and Lucky were white. The production later travelled to Connecticut and to London.

THE QUESTION OF segregated casting also arose in a different form. From the 1960s on, but most intensively in the 1980s, a number of women's groups staged, and sought to stage, all-female versions of Godot. Beckett was very firm on this matter; he felt strongly that the characters in this play were male, and that to tamper with this would be nonsensical. "Women don't have prostates," he commented at one point, referring to Vladimir's constant need to urinate because of his ailing prostate. Many of the appeals made to Beckett requesting permission for performances of this kind were of a fervently personal nature, and he actually yielded in at least one case, telling a German director that her production could go on as long as it had only one run, and as long as the publicity for the production made clear his position of "total disapproval" (his German publishers, however, refused to authorise this Godot).
Many others took place without his permission, and he found out about them only afterwards. But the most public exhibition of his "disapproval" came just a year before his death, when legal action was taken against a Dutch theatre company which sought to cast only women.

The judge in Haarlem ruled against Beckett, stating that because the play was about the human condition in general, it could be played by either gender. Beckett was furious, and immediately banned all productions of his plays in the Netherlands.

That this is an issue that refuses to go away was illustrated once more just last month, when the Beckett estate lost its case against the casting of twin sisters as Vladimir and Estragon in an Italian production. A court in Rome ruled that men did not have a monopoly on the parts, and the director afterwards stated that the women looked "like men onstage".

The Italian case is not the only controversy to have visited Godot in this, Beckett's centenary year. In order to prevent a clash with its own production of the play, opening at the end of this month, the Barbican in London - which, together with the Gate in Dublin holds the licence to stage the play - recently vetoed a production planned by Peter Hall, who directed the play's English-language premiere in 1955, claiming that a run of the play too close to its own would pose a serious financial risk.

"Stalinistic," said Hall; "sad," said John Tusa of the Barbican; "Bullying," said Michael Colgan of the Gate. Each party, naturally, has his own take on what Beckett himself would have made of the row, but it's hard not to think of the lines Beckett wrote to his friend Tom MacGreevy in the wake of the original London production: "I am tired of the whole thing and the endless misunderstanding.

Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can't make out!"

Thankfully, however, the world has not tired of Godot, and the show - and the complications - will go on. We're waiting.