Time passes slowly for the characters and audiences of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 theater of the absurd classic Waiting for Godot, and yet the play itself has proven timeless, with an ability to be performed in a wide variety of locales and languages.
Yet despite the theme and dialogue’s ability to transcend language and culture, the two-act play — and considered by many critics to be the most significant English-language play of the 20th century — has rarely been seen in Taiwan, either in English or Mandarin, since the first production in 1965.
In the past two decades there have been just a handful of shows: Stan Lai (賴聲川) directed a version at the National Theater in 2001 for his Performance Workshop (表演工作坊), while the Contemporary Legend Theatre (當代傳奇劇場) did a Beijing opera-ish version at the Metropolitan Hall in 2005.
Photo: courtesy of Phoenix Theatre
Deutsches Theater Berlin brought their production to that same hall in 2017 as part of the Taipei Arts Festival, while Coism (明日和合製作所) used the title and the idea of waiting for something to happen for their five-minute shows as part of this year’s Nuit Blanche Taipei last month.
However, the Phoenix Theatre, which was launched in 1999 and was a stalwart of local English-language productions for many years, chose the play to mark its return to the Taipei stage after a hiatus of more than a decade.
The play, which will be performed this weekend at Soochow University, has been directed by Catherine Diamond, a professor of literature and theater at university, as well as an author, flamenco dancer and director of the Phoenix Theatre and the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project.
Photo: courtesy of Phoenix Theatre
She said that the Phoenix team thought that Waiting for Godot was an appropriate choice for this COVID-19 stricken year.
It is an “apt text to perform while human societies are in stasis, waiting for the pandemic to end and to see what the post-virus future looks like. What do we all do while waiting? We wait because we assume that this will end and is not the new normal…yet,” she wrote in the production notes.
However, it is not just COVID-19 that propelled the team. They also wanted to explore another crisis facing the world crisis, global warming and an overheated Earth.
Beckett set his play in a post-World War II northern Europe wasteland, when the institutional structures of so many countries had been devastated, but Diamond said Phoenix has transposed the action to the hot and humid climes of the global south.
Waiting for Godot is about two men, Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi), who are waiting for a friend, Godot. They swap tales as they wait, and sleep, dream or engage with an occasional passer-by.
It can be seen as an allegory about life and death — or boredom — and while sometimes it seems endlessly bleak, there are threads of humor laced throughout.
Most of the five-member cast of Waiting for Godot are veterans of earlier Phoenix productions or those by other small troupes such as Outcast Theatre, the Taipei Alien Dramatic Society or the Butterfly Effect Theatre Company: Maurice Harrington, Paul Jackson, Sara Tarbox, Peter Balfy and Aiden Lin.
Diamond said the Phoenix production has given the play “a Taiwanese twist,” but because Beckett, when asked to describe his characters, “reputedly said: ‘The only thing I’m sure of is that they’re wearing bowlers,’ we have preserved their hats.’”
One twist that the team is divulging ahead of time is that all the actors change roles from Act I to Act II.
The play will be performed in English, with Mandarin subtitles.
There are several buses that run by Soochow University from the Shihlin MRT Station Exit 1: Nos. 557, 255, 304, 30, 18 and 620.
One of the biggest sore spots in Taiwan’s historical friendship with the US came in 1979 when US president Jimmy Carter broke off formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan’s Republic of China (ROC) government so that the US could establish relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Taiwan’s derecognition came purely at China’s insistence, and the US took the deal. Retired American diplomat John Tkacik, who for almost decade surrounding that schism, from 1974 to 1982, worked in embassies in Taipei and Beijing and at the Taiwan Desk in Washington DC, recently argued in the Taipei Times that “President Carter’s derecognition
JUNE 30 to JULY 6 After being routed by the Japanese in the bloody battle of Baguashan (八卦山), Hsu Hsiang (徐驤) and a handful of surviving Hakka fighters sped toward Tainan. There, he would meet with Liu Yung-fu (劉永福), leader of the Black Flag Army who had assumed control of the resisting Republic of Formosa after its president and vice-president fled to China. Hsu, who had been fighting non-stop for over two months from Taoyuan to Changhua, was reportedly injured and exhausted. As the story goes, Liu advised that Hsu take shelter in China to recover and regroup, but Hsu steadfastly
You can tell a lot about a generation from the contents of their cool box: nowadays the barbecue ice bucket is likely to be filled with hard seltzers, non-alcoholic beers and fluorescent BuzzBallz — a particular favorite among Gen Z. Two decades ago, it was WKD, Bacardi Breezers and the odd Smirnoff Ice bobbing in a puddle of melted ice. And while nostalgia may have brought back some alcopops, the new wave of ready-to-drink (RTD) options look and taste noticeably different. It is not just the drinks that have changed, but drinking habits too, driven in part by more health-conscious consumers and
On Sunday, President William Lai (賴清德) delivered a strategically brilliant speech. It was the first of his “Ten Lectures on National Unity,” (團結國家十講) focusing on the topic of “nation.” Though it has been eclipsed — much to the relief of the opposing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) — by an ill-advised statement in the second speech of the series, the days following Lai’s first speech were illuminating on many fronts, both domestic and internationally, in highlighting the multi-layered success of Lai’s strategic move. “OF COURSE TAIWAN IS A COUNTRY” Never before has a Taiwanese president devoted an entire speech to
RSS