POZZO:
(suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

We were at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds to see their production of Waiting for Godot with Ian Brown directing the Talawa Theatre Company‘s all Black cast.

The play has been produced with an all-Black cast several times before, though this is the first time in the UK. The text, however, is so strong and so insistent that before ten minutes of the first act had passed the skin colour of the players had become insignificant. The main duo chatter away in authentic Carribean accents, but again, this does not affect the audiences interpretation of the play. I have seen productions with Irish, Scottish, French, American and English accents, but I can’t honestly claim that any of these have improved my enjoyment or understanding of the text,

Nevertheless, the cast is a strong one and they push the play forward with tremendous energy and skill. If I had to single out a performance to tip the scales, it would be Guy Burgess’s portrayal of Lucky. But this is to take nothing away from the other players and the director, all of whom should be rightfully proud of their achievement.

This production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot reminded me of Beckett’s 1930 essay on Proust, where he demonstrates how time, habit, memory and salvation permeate À la recherche du temps perdu. The passing of time is a constant reminder of death, and as a way of by-passing this, Proust’s characters fall into everyday habits, repetition, boredom, distractions. This in turn can lead to the awakening of involuntary memory, and in that moment, the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. Involuntary memory undoes time and habit. This is a kind of salvation.

Beckett is not only concerned with Proust, he is primarily concerned with his own influences and preoccupations and to work out an aesthetic manifesto on which to base his future preoccupations.

Time, habit, and memory are the concepts which underline Waiting for Godot, and there are multiple references to them in the play.

The other thing that came to mind while watching the performance was the recollection that Tennessee Williams called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play.’ Menagerie was written eight years before Godot and concentrates on a series of abandonments, but it also has everyone in the cast and the audience ‘waiting’, in this case for a gentleman caller. Perhaps Godot is also a ‘memory’ play in the same sense?

I don’t know who Godot is. I don’t even know (above all don’t know) if he exists. And I don’t know if they believe in him or not – those two who are waiting for him. The other two who pass by towards the end of each of the two acts, that must be to break up the monotony. All I knew I showed. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin. I’ll even say that I would have been satisfied with less. As for wanting to find in all that a broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with the program and the Eskimo pie, I cannot see the point of it. But it must be possible … Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, their time and their space, I was able to know them a little, but far from the need to understand. Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me. They and I are through with each other.
Samuel Beckett.

The play continues at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until the 25th February, then goes on tour to Albany Deptford London, Old Rep Birmingham, Theatre Royal Winchester and New Wolsey Ipswich.

Reviews of previous productions of this play are available here and here.

The following is from page 2:

In the sitting room there’s a photo of Miranda, which I took on a cold weekend walk at the Norfolk coast. She’s standing with her back to the camera, looking out to sea. The light is coming straight at the lens, and she’s little more than a silhouette: big boots, narrow shoulders wrapped in an ethnic something-or-other, hair streaming in the wind. Somehow that’s the image that comes to me, frail, romantic Miranda, rather than the arranger of breakfast meetings, the recipient of local chamber-of-commerce awards, the Miranda of the last few years. Soon a wave is going to break over her: police, maybe the media. How will she cope? I wish I could feel optimistic, but Miranda isn’t a person who deals well with the world’s unpredictability. She’s always fought hard against randomness, with all the weapons in the stationer’s: a little arsenal of agenda and diaries and wall-planners dotted with coloured stars. Poor Miranda, no amount of Post-its will ward off what’s about to happen to you. You’re utterly unprepared.

The stairs creak as I climb up to the bedroom. I have to duck my head to go through the door, I’ve never found the low ceilings and narrow corridors of country cottages quaint, at least not straightforwardly. They’re scaled to the small stature of poorly nourished people; an architecture of hardship and deprivation. Of course I’ve never said this to Miranda. Irregular walls and creaking floorboards please her. I think she’d like to forget she was born into an industrial society. I can’t, at least not in the same way. That kind of mystification has never seemed right to me. It’s so incoherent, for one thing. A country life, but with plumbing and telecoms and antibiotics. A rich person’s fantasy.

But this is our house, or rather Miranda’s house, the house she allowed me to share and always wanted me to love as she did. I realize I’m standing with my fists clenched, glaring at the William Morris wallpaper, the patchwork cushions of the armchair. Above our bed, hanging from the oak beam, is a dream-catcher. I tug at it, breaking the string. I’ve wanted to do that for so long. Such an absurd, out-of-place thing. Our house is filled with these objects – tribal, spiritual, hand-crafted little knick-knacks that are supposed to edge us nearer to Miranda’s wish-fulfilment future of agrarian harmony. There are corn dollies and old glass bottles and prints of medicinal herbs with quotations from Culpeper printed underneath in calligraphic lettering. ‘Only from lucre of money they cheat you, and tell you it is a kind of tear, or some such like thing, that drops from Poppies when they weep.’ That’s outside the bathroom. Culpeper is natural, and natural is the flag Miranda waves at the world, the banner standing for righteousness and truth.

Why am I doing this, breaking her things? None of it’s her fault. She’s worked hard to make the life she wanted. She’s tried to be a good person. And she has loved me. I know that will be the most terrible thing – the look on her face, the gradual opening of the abyss. Everything she has known or believed about me, her lover, her partner for sixteen years, the man who has been a stepfather to her daughter, is untrue. Or if not untrue – for I’ve tried no to tell unnecessary lies – then partial, incomplete.

Listen to me. Partial, incomplete. I’m even lying to myself. It could hardly be worse; she doesn’t even know my real name.

Hari Kunzru published this memory or time novel in 2007. A memory novel is when a narrative of now interchanges with a narrative of then, and the problem is usually that the ‘then’ narrative is more colourful and vibrant than the ‘now’ narrative. I should add that this wasn’t the case, at least for me, with My Revolutions.

Fifty-year-old Mike Frame has a past that his partner, Miranda and step-daughter Sam know nothing about, lived under another name amidst the turbulence of the revolutionary armed struggle of the 1970s.

He’s been on the run for a long time, from the authorities and from himself, but now, inexplicably he glimpses an old comrade and lover while on holiday in France; and back in England a friend from the past turns up on his doorstep, looking to reminisce, and to blackmail. It seems to Mike that he has to face up to the contradiction between who he is and who he once was.

Mike’s story brings to mind the work of groups like The Baader Meinhof Gang, the Weathermen, and the Angry Brigade. It is the journey from political radicalism to armed terrorism.

But in Kunzru’s hands the narrative isn’t allowed to descend into a right-wing nightmare. He is concerned to contrast and compare the political idealism and naïvety of the sixties and seventies with the bleak compromises of the nineties and the opening years of the present century. And at the same time, though as sub-text, he is concerned with personal psychology, particularly in the making and dismantling of identity. How identity is put together piecemeal, collected on the run, so to speak. And how easily it is torn down.

This is an enjoyable novel, probably suffering from a little too much research. But there is much to be admired in it, and I’ll certainly look for more from Hari Kunzru.

‘Are you all right?’ the daughter asked, standing in the entrance to light her cigarette.

‘I’m OK,’ the mother replied, sitting at the table. ‘I’ve been thinking about things, that’s all. I’ll get through.’

‘Thinking’s fine,’ the daughter said. ‘Dwelling’s something else.’

‘That’s true.’

I’ve taken to using my mobile to jot things down in public. I used to use a notebook but in recent years people are more suspicious of notebooks, pens, recording equipment, where the mobile is ever present, always in someone’s hand, the innocent bystander.

Some things are written down and others forgotten. Forgetting is a failure of memory. We make lists (we write) in order to remember. Technology comes to our aid, it allows us to separate out those pieces of experience we want to remember from everything else we are willing to let go.

A single man enters the courtyard, middle-aged, balding, overweight, blotchy. The mother knows him and her countenance brightens. ‘We’re going to see each other later,’ he says. Some kind of get together, most likely. A drinking party? I can’t imagine a lovers’ liaison.

‘We certainly are,’ she says.

‘Don’t forget.’

‘I wouldn’t do that.’

‘We have to go now,’ the daughter tells him.

‘Just a swift one, this,’ the mother explains, finishing her pint, getting to her feet.

He brings a drink from the bar and sits behind me on the top of three stone steps. ‘The mountings,’ he says.

I half turn to confirm he’s speaking to me.

‘These steps,’ he says. ‘Called the mountings. This was a coaching inn, way back, and the steps were for people to climb into the coach.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Before that it was a pigsty,’ he said. ‘And they used it as a market to sell chickens. Fifteen hundred and something, medieval. Think about that.’

He went back to his ale.

I went back to my mobile.

I wrote:
‘Writing is a struggle against silence,’ something I’d read in the work of Carlos Fuentes.

When I got to my feet the man on the step said, ‘Watch how you go.’

*

Silence is knowing: like in this poem by John Haines:

Poem of the Forgotten

I came to this place,
a young man green and lonely.

Well quit of the world,
I framed a house of moss and timber,
called it a home,
and sat in the warm evenings
singing to myself as a man sings
when he knows there is no one to hear.

I made my bed under the shadow
of leaves, and awoke
in the first snow of autumn,
filled with silence.

Back in March 2007 I posted a review of the same play with Jessica Lange in the starring role, and it was interesting and instructive to compare and contrast the differences in the two productions.

In Lange’s case one could really believe she was a faded beauty. She certainly believed it herself and the possibility of receiving 27 gentlemen callers in one day didn’t seem to stretch the point too far. With Blethyn’s portrayal, so many gentlemen in one day was a remote possibility, or, rather, a creative act of the imagination. Lange had looked after herself as much as possible, whereas Blethyn was quite content to pad around the flat in a worn old dressing gown. On the other hand Blethyn is interesting to watch and, especially, to listen to. She makes extraordinary sounds. Sounds of sympathy or incredulity which come from somewhere towards the back of her throat, a kind of vocal interrogation chamber where words are put to the rack and meaning squeezed out of them.

One has to wonder if so many revivals of the play (there was another one up in Edinburgh last month) are coming because America once again resembles Tom Wingfield’s opening remarks about the thirties when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. The coming election where all candidates are lying through their teeth and the series of denials about the real effects of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, gun control.

Because, although The Glass Menagerie concentrates its focus on one family, we are left in no doubt that Williams’ is concerned, by extension, with the community which was also his life. And this one family, the Wingfields, tell each other and themselves, lies all the time.

There are no clear victims or victors here. Each family member is complicit in locking himself or herself into the rigid web of the family. Each of them needs to be exactly as they are in order to maintain their own position and to support the position of the others. The almost terminally shy and crippled Laura has made the same decisions as her mother and brother and forfeited (as far as any audience is concerned) her special claim to pity. We only pity her as much as we pity her brother or her mother.

In the final analyses none of them can escape their chains. Tom runs away but is still tightly bound in his mind: Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! . . . For nowadays the world is lit by lightening! Blow out your candles, Laura...

A tremendous production, really enjoyable. And although Brenda Blethyn stands out, the cast has a real feeling of ensemble about it. The language, the language . . . is magical . . . it lifts you out of your seat and pushes, pulls and cajoles you around the gamut of possible emotions.

The picture shows Brenda Blethyn as Amanda Wingfield and Emma Hamilton as Laura Wingfield.

This’s not how I’d do and I never left this place to do nothing. Not me. I’d sure ‘member something like that. I’m not going down for something like that. I’m clean in this respect.

Permission to speak, sir?

Some other guy might’ve but I wasn’t the one done this and that’s the truth. Somebody done point the finger at me to cover their own tracks. Might be I’ve got more mash than him or extra gravy, something, I don’t know if it was that or something else. Something he got in his head pointing me out but it’s a lie ’cause I never went near that. Not even thinking. Not me. You can say what you like. It’s not me going down. I wasn’t the one there. I’m not interested in that.

I might’ve thunk it. Permission to speak, sir?

Any soldier can think a thing like that in a dream. I’m on sentry or something and my brain’s working on by itself. But I wouldn’t've left my post for it. And I ain’t been off this post in weeks. I’m working here and sleepin’ and eatin’ and buffing and dreamin’ and when I have to go out over the wall I’m puttin’ my life on the line and sometimes getting back and being suprised I’m still breathi’ but that’s all I’m doing. Reading letters sometime from back home. Being punished one way or another. Keepin’ my nose clean, trying to. So it wasn’t me. No, sir. I’m the one didn’t do that. Not me.

Anyone say different he’s a liar. Should say his prayers. Wash his mouth out with soap. Talkin’ lies. Middle of a war an all.

Permission to speak, sir?

OK. It can come into a guy’s head. That stuff. Listen to the others talk, how they at it all the time. An if there’s plenty liquor and she’s begging me and whispering in my ear and smellin’ sweet an everyone’s saying the next time we go over there we’re not coming back. It could happen then but I ain’t admitting nothing ’cause there’s no memory of it or any names and I’d sure ‘member a thing like that if it happened to me.

If it’s a sin, whatever. I don’t care what they call it, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s not a question about me. It’s a question about somebody else.

Permission to speak, sir?

I don’t mind taking a bullet. I’m not arguing for it, cause no one wants a bullet. But if the bullet’s coming for a man that’s what he’s gonna get. There’s plenty of men with a bullet had their name on it and even if you’re ducking and weaving that bullet’s gonna keep on coming till it makes itself at home. Guys on the field with their mouth open and that startled look. Flutterin’ eyes. Sometimes dead and dyin’ and there’s no blood.

No, sir. Wasn’t this soldier. Other things I done I’ll stand up and take the rap. This thing wasn’t on my tab.

Permission to speak, sir?

I might’ve agreed to it or not. I don’t have no memory. I don’t know her face, sir, or her name. I don’t know how she knows my name. Five foot two don’t mean nothing. Fair hair. Nobody said nothing about getting pregnant. If somebody’d said something about getting pregnant it would never’ve happened. Not with no female. Not on my watch. What we were saying was all through the liquor and we should have some fun one time before we die. That’s no way to die and still be a virgin like some of those guys we bring in. Bodies not been anywhere or done anything ‘cept with their folks. They got mud on their faces and might’ve shot somebody and been to school and never seen a woman. And now they’re not gonna. The train’s left the station and they’re not on board.

Permission to speak, sir? It couldda been me I suppose. Couldda been any of us. We all in the same boat.

No, sir, that is not an admission, sir. No way. Not me. I’m sure. That’s the one thing I can say I’m sure.

Joseph’s crippling post-traumatic stress comes from an incident that happened during his time in the army in Ireland. The event itself may not have been traumatic to another soldier. Someone was killed, but only during the normal course of duty. There was no bomb involved, no massacre, not even the death of an innocent. A more or less average day at a border patrol meant Joseph had to pull the trigger to save the life of a comrade.

This novel revisits, in some measure, the themes of Seiffert’s previous work, particularly her take on guilt. But although it is a study in the mechanics of post-traumatic stress syndrome, it also addresses the topic of memory.

Joseph’s memory is ambiguous to say the least. He does not seem able to remember what happened, who he was before the trauma, nor who he is supposed to be to his girlfriend, Alice, or to his sister or parents or friends.

His single obsession, although ostensibly the frightening thing that happened to him, is, in reality, himself. Because of this self-obsession he can no longer relate to anyone else with any degree of reality. Because he fears he will run out of control he can no longer tolerate the existence of others around him. He reaches out to them from time to time, but any or no response is liable to see him overwhelmed with rage.

This is a competent novel, perhaps a courageous one. But after the bright promise of the Booker shortlisted The Dark Room(2001), it is ultimately disappointing.

You write in your book about Montaigne, who confessed to having a poor memory and to forgetting about books he himself had written. Which leads you to ask: If we read a book and forget that we read it, is that the same as never having read it?

I think between reading and nonreading there is an indeterminate space that is quite important, a space where you have books you have skimmed, books you have heard about and books you have forgotten. You don’t have to feel guilty about it.

These things are even more true when they happen in the middle of the night. For then, if you forgot to bring the notebook to bed with you, you have to get out of bed, go downstairs, switch on the light, find the notebook and get whatever it was came to you into the notebook. OK, there’s a slim chance if you don’t do this you’ll still remember it in the morning, but do you want to take a chance like that?

This is from my notebook:

A teacher in the local arts college told me about asking her new intake of students what were the three best and worst things in the world. One of the young guys told her:

The best three things in the world: cakes, my girlfriend, and television.

And the worst three: death, sprouts, and opera.

You see? Without the notebook I could have lost that.