Word: beckett
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...about two years ago-and then by accident. "I happened to carve a piece of wood that had fallen off a chair," he recalls. "I didn't really know how to carve, but as a scriptwriter I had been influenced by the French theater of the absurd, especially Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. So I decided to try to carve a kind of theater of the absurd in wood." Though many foreigners and Chinese alike have been impressed by the energy and originality of his work, he is not recognized...
Finally, Ashton claims that "Aeschylus and Sheridan, Feydeau and Joe Orton are ill-assorted companions"; this is nonsense, as anyone familiar with theatrical repertory knows. The ART season will include Shakespeare and Feiffer, Beckett and Beaumarchais; the Blaridge productions are, I think, similarly well-chosen. To follow the course of specialization Ashton suggests would, over the length of a season, bore the actors almost as much as the audience, and destroy the whole purpose for which the company was started...
Horwitz appears to be waiting for the big deal of the day behind Door Number Two, not Godot; his interpretation of Pozzo is out of line with the rest of the characters. Somehow, he's convinced that his world is not reduced to nothingness. But Beckett would have Pozzo contemplate sex, war and food--human experience--like an unfulfilled poet searching impotently for the right word to end a stanza. Horwitz's Pozzo is too animated in a lifeless and desolate wilderness, where the only legitimate spirit takes the form of Godot's messenger, a young boy played ably...
...blame Horwitz for a misinterpretation, or Cornuelle for a partially satisfying production when the nature of Beckett's play is so ambiguous? Everything and nothing makes sense. His characters are not only waiting for Godot, they are waiting for waiting, preoccupied with the lack of activity. Estragon cries out in an exasperated voice: "I don't know why I don't know!" and the hollowness of his confession typifies the void the playwright strives to create...
...nature of the material remains overwhelming. The actors cannot maintain the mesmeric quality required for the drone of meaninglessness that continues throughout the evening. After the third or fourth "nothing to be done," or "we're waiting for Godot," we feel an incredible urge to escape. But Beckett won't let us get away that easily. Godot is three hours of mental torment; characters lisp absurdities while we squirm in our chairs, bothered as much by the play as much as by this production...