This year marks the birth centenary of Samuel Beckett, the protean Irish playwright, novelist, poet, critic and Nobel laureate whose bleak worldview and radical art in seminal dramas like “Waiting for Godot,” “Endgame” and “Happy Days” helped redefine modern theater.
Visiting French director Alain Timar is well aware of the global hubbub in Beckett’s 100th year, but he has a more emotional reason for mounting a local production of “Waiting for Godot” starting June 22 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
“Last year I came to Manila,” he says, “and I was really impressed to see very poor people living side by side with very rich people. While riding a taxi, I saw these shanties along the railroad, only a short distance away from Makati! This is impossible to see in Europe.”
So fascinated was Timar that he visited one such area - “this place between Makati and Malate,” he says, apparently referring to San Andres Bukid).
“They were very kind, very gentle, not aggressive at all. I wasn’t naive, I knew the situation could be dangerous, but for the most part they were very nice. And they were smiling all the time.”
Artistic statement
What Timar had stumbled on was the uniquely Filipino brand of sunshiny resiliency against crushing odds. Rather incredibly, what came to his mind next was Beckett’s masterpiece, often seen as the archetypal artistic statement on the futility and irrationality of life.
In Beckett’s play two tramps named Vladimir and Estragon wait for a certain person named Godot — who may or may not come, and whose business with the two is never made clear. They bicker, banter with and amuse each other to while away the time. The play ends without Godot ever making an appearance, but it is implied Vladimir and Estragon will continue to wait.
Timar, artistic director of Theatre des Halles in Avignon, France, and an artist who enjoys a “non-traditional” reputation, thought the play could be transposed to the local setting, with the two men becoming derelicts living by the rail tracks. However, to be true to what he saw during his visit, it would not be a treatise on pointlessness, but on how hope survives even in such miserable surroundings.
“‘Waiting for Godot’ is usually called an absurd play,” he says, “and that’s the traditional, academic, philosophical view. But I saw how it could work in the local version, with these people living by the rails.”
“The rails”—he brandishes a sketch of Gino Gonzales’ planned set design showing a short span of riles bisecting the stage—“have a symbolic significance. They come from nothing and go into nothing. They are a symbol of infinity, of travel. They are a way for these people to leave their poverty behind. They can be a symbol for happiness.”
“I think that waiting is a form of hoping,” he says.
“And ‘Godot’ is absolutely not absurd. ‘Absurd’ is an invention of teachers and academics. ‘Absurd’ is when you step back and put some distance between you and the material,” argues Timar. “I met Beckett twice, and I think that, for him, Godot represented the condition of life. Everyday we work, we live, we love, and then we die. We hope for something else, but we continue to live.”
Optimists would see that as purposefulness, pessimists as meaninglessness. Timar is firmly on the upbeat side.
“‘Godot’ is not about nonsense. Yes, these people are poor, the lowest class, but they are a symbol of positive humanity, too. The situation is really hard, but they’re human, too — perhaps more human than the rest of society. I am inspired by that, that’s why I tell my actors, ‘Smile, please.’ Life is hard, but smiling is beautiful.”
Manila atmosphere
Besides the open, welcoming faces he saw among the city’s destitute that he now wants to bring to the stage, Timar is also aware of the peculiar requirements of translating Beckett to local culture.
“Our target is to approach Filipino culture and not to translate Western culture into a local stage. We have to live in Filipino culture, to adapt to the Manila atmosphere,” he says.
So his homework has included finding the local equivalent of Estragon’s favorite food—carrots, turnips, radish. Now it’s Sky Flakes, Blue Skies, Fita. Where Beckett spoke of plush places in the Pyrenees, now it’s Makati or Boracay. And “Waiting for Godot” is now retitled “Godot, Wer Is U?”
The actors Timar has chosen — Paolo O’Hara, Bong Cabrera, Cris Pasturan and Paolo Rodriguez — are no slouches in playing materially bereft characters. O’Hara and Rodriguez were part of Loy Arcenas’ “Ang Romansa ni Magno Rubio” in 2004, about Filipino migrants in the dust bowls of 1930s America. Cabrera and Pasturan alternated as the rapping Mercutio in Tanghalang Pilipino’s genre-bending, jologs-celebrating “R’meo Luvs Dew-lhiett” last year. And Rodriguez slugged it out with Mario O’Hara and Irma Adlawan in another poverty-soaked Tanghalang Pilipino play, Hanoch Levin’s “Ang Pokpok ng Ohio.”
Timar himself does not speak Filipino, but he has devised an ingenious way of directing these actors. His script comes in three versions: French, English and Filipino. Every single line is numbered, so he knows exactly where the actors are at a given point. With the help of a couple of assistants who guide him on the Filipino translation (by George de Jesus III), “I hear the music of the lines, and I can understand every word. That’s how I also direct the lines,” he explains.
“Everyday, we’re seeing that Beckett’s writing is very close to the local version. We have a very strong connection between the play and the realistic situation of this people. In this way, we can say that Beckett is really universal,” he adds.
As Timar describes it, the process is a constant dialogue between two cultures—his French background and the local context. This "Godot" will not be a philosophical or existentialist version but an earthbound, sensitive one reflecting marginalization and survival in Filipino society.
“I tell my actors, look around you. Pick the attitudes, find the realistic relationships between the stage and real life. You are the lawyers for these people. Show their real humanity.”
“Godot, Wer Is U?” runs June 22-25 at the CCP as part of the International Theater Festival 2006, and Sept. 8-Oct. 1 as part of Tanghalang Pilipino’s 20th theater season.
E-mail ccptanghalan@yahoo.com for more information.
