Waiting for Godot performed in Khayelitsha
Photos: Damian Crook
One look at the sprawling shacks literally across the road from the O.R. Tambo Sports Centre in Khayelitsha and the seemingly endless agony of waiting for a better life is quite apparent. At a once-off performance here on a cold Monday evening (August 2), Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece and a watershed play in the history of theatre, struck an immediate chord.
The British production directed by Sean Mathias started at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London’s West End and is on a world tour, with a cast that includes Sir Ian McKellen. The renowned actor is well known to a wide audience for his role as Gandalf in the blockbuster film trilogy The Lord of the Rings.
Godot is perceived to be a notoriously difficult text. When first performed in London in 1955, it was greeted with incomprehension. The story goes that critic Harold Hobson left the auditorium, but was persuaded to go back inside and trust the experience. The legendary critic Kenneth Tynan, required a few weeks to understand the work, but then concluded: the play ‘forced me to re-examine the rules which had hitherto governed the drama’. Beckett went on to receive the Nobel Prize.
It might be a revelation for those who intellectualize Beckett, how the local citizens of Khayelitsha, many with limited exposure to formal theatre, enjoyed and understood the performance. After all, Athol Fugard directed a production of Godot in 1962 at the Rehearsal Room in Johannesburg with an all-black cast. One of the earliest productions was in San Quentin prison, where Beckett’s absurdity is still all too real.
Mathias and his cast were determined despite real logistical challenges to tour to Khayelitsha, if only for one performance. They describe it as a highlight of their world tour. McKellen has also been visiting schools in the area. He has now performed this production of Godot in 17 theatres.
When we arrive at the hall, they are still rehearsing, having re-blocked the performance for this one show.
An audience of around 600 gathered, about a third white, among all of them many recognisable faces from the arts community. People started queuing from 5pm; the play was scheduled to start at 6pm, but “curtain” – there was of course no curtain or proscenium arch – “went up” only at 6:30pm. A marimba band entertained patrons while they waited.
Admission was on a “pay-what-you-can” basis. The box office says tickets sold for as little as ten cents, while one person paid R1000. People continued to trickle in right up until interval, filling the stands at the back of the hall.
Dressed as a dishevelled tramp, McKellen (Estragon/Gogo) enters first, removing his boot to show a bleeding, suppurating foot. When Gogo says: “We’ve no rights anymore? . . . We’ve lost our rights?’, you can feel the audience’s ears prick up.
Soon he and his vagrant cohort, Vladimir (Roger Rees) are talking of hanging themselves from a tree, which will give them the added benefit of an erection. There is loud laughter. The entire evening is punctuated with applause and laughter. Gasps when Lucky (Brendan O’Hea), with his sad face, enters with a rope lead noosed around his neck, weighted down with a huge leather bag, wicker-basket and folding chair. His master, Pozzo (Matthew Kelly), has all the comic horror of the child-killing clown in the film of Stephen King’s It. When he demands of the homeless men: ‘Waiting? . . . Here? On my land?’, a series of ‘Yo! Yo! Yo!’ is emitted by a woman sitting behind me. There are protests as Lucky is called “pig”, “hog”, and obediently holds Pozzo’s whip in his mouth – the subjugated complicit in his oppression; dead silence when Rees shouts: ‘It’s a scandal! . . . To treat a man like that!”; loud chuckles and pointing as McKellen gnaws Pozzo’s discarded chicken bones from the floor.
More applause after Lucky’s avalanche of a monologue ends with his collapse; belly laughs when the exhausted Lucky topples over again and Gogo says, ‘Oh, his doing it on purpose’.
Near the conclusion of Act 1, a follow-spotlight accompanied by an eerie sound effect falls on the two tramps. Someone in the audience mutters, “Ooh! Police!”
In the second half when the characters all crumple in a heap, children squeal with delight.
The performance ends to whistles, cheers, and synchronised clapping. The actors exit the stage into the audience, shaking hands, posing for photographs on cellphones. It has been a success.
Waiting for Godot closes at the Fugard Theatre on August 14.
Tel: 021-461 4554.
