(Director's) Notes INTRO

Godot directory:

"What do I know about man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes." -Samuel Beckett

* directing pages "Stagematrix" 2006:

Waiting for Godot

Robinson Crusoe, a romance about one man rebuilding the world, becomes a different kind of book when his island proves to contain a second man, black Friday. A pair of men has an irreducibly primitive appeal. They can talk to one another, and it soon becomes clear how little either one is capable of saying. Each is 'a little world made cunningly', each has enjoyed many many thousands of hours of the fullest consciousness of which he is capable, each has learned to speak, and learned to cipher, and seen perhaps many cities like Odysseus, or perhaps just Manchester. Each has been torn by passions, each has known calm, each has ingested a universe through his five senses, and arranged its elements in his mind for ready access according to social and pedagogical custom. And they can share almost none of all this. Toward one another they turn faces that might almost as well be blank spheres, and wonderful as words are they can speak, each of them, but one word at a time, so that they must arrange these words in strings, poor starved arrangements, virtually empty by comparison with all that presses within them to be said.

Circle (cyclical "time" and "time-arror"):
Three chronotopes:
1. Vladimir-Estragon (eternity)
2. Pozzo-Licky (history, chronology)
3. Audience (Boy -- present)

What about the SPACE?

Poem (like)

In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable
of keeping silent.
You're right, we're inexhaustible.
It's so we won't think.
We have that excuse.
It's so we won't hear.
We have our reasons.
All the dead voices.
They make a noise like wings.
Like leaves.
Like sand.
Like leaves. 

Silence. 

They all speak at once.
Each to itself. 

Silence. 

Rather they whisper.
They rustle.
They murmur.
They rustle. 

Silence. 

What do they say?
They talk about their lives.
To have lived is not enough for them.
They have to talk about it.
To be dead is not enough for them.
It is not sufficient. 

Silence. 

They make a noise like feathers.
Like leaves.
Like ashes.
Like leaves. 

Long silence. 

Say something!
I'm trying. 

Long silence. 



(in anguish). Say anything at all!
What do we do now?
Wait for Godot.
Ah! 

Silence. 

This is awful! 

"Irisn Scenes" (vs. French Scenes) : I try to break the action with ----- lines. Beat of Action (segments, bits)... I don't know, if I will be able to do it for the entire script. Only for the scenes in classes (acting-directing). If Beckett's pauses is not enough!

(Fast, pauses only when "dramatic pauses"!)

B: Make sense who may. I switch off.

photo by Kade Mendelowitz
Theatre UAF Spring 2006