Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Director: Everett Dixon
Acting Coach: Camilo Carvajal
Set and Costume Design: José Aristizábal

Página web del teatro Anhelo del Salmón
Programación de Esperando a Godot en el XII Festival Iberoamericano de Bogotá
Reseña de la obra en el blog del maestro Sandro Romero
Entrevista con Everett Dixon con Colombia.com













Leonardo Villa, Gadiel López and Edward Gómez as Lucky, Estragon and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. (Photo: Carlos Mario Lema)


THE PARADOX OF SAMUEL BECKETT

Beckett dedicated his life to unmasking the emptiness behind language, and was implacable in his honesty at the manipulative senselessness of daily discourse. He put all of his linguistic virtuosity - as another brilliant writer, Vladimir Nabokov - into the game of taking language apart. But it is curious that an author who kept after emptiness so much should write plays so full of meaning beyond words. His plays, set on avoiding the traps of language in search of a terrifying honesty, surprise us with their light vitality, their childlike innocence, their readiness to play, and, significantly, their abundance of meaning. The best moments in Beckett, like Pozzo's description of the sunset, are suddenly, and shockingly, moving. Milton, in writing Paradise Lost, wanted to write a morality play, and wound up writing an inadvertent apology for the devil and original sin. In some ways, Beckett does the opposite: he wants to show that there is nothing beyond language but nothing and more nothing, and he winds up writing eloquent testimonies to ineffable fullness of life.

This irresistible exaltation of the fullness of life comes in his plays from two sources. The first is the same vital energy that unites us all, which the Catholic Church calls the Holy Spirit, the Japanese call ki, and actors like us, always more prosaic, simply call "play". In his project to prove the senselessness of life, he wound up writing a celebration of life. But was it really his project? Or has the old fox deceived us all? Sometimes I think that old Sam, always suspicious of words but always ready to laugh, has played a wonderful practical joke on us: it seems that he knew all along that the only way to express the fullness of life was with a mute paradox, an "act without words". An old fox so determined to feign cynicism that many still believe it years after his death. The second source of the irresistible energy of this play is in the paradoxical vision of Beckett himself.

We come to the theatre, fifty four years later, we see the absurd antics of Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo and Lucky, their awkward desires, their innocent attempts at meaning "in spite of everything," and we come out curiously revitalized. They have nowhere to go at the end of the day, the food is slight, but still, the road has its special luminescence, and where all else fails, the four are still able to tell a good joke. As Beckett says somewhere, there is nothing more comic than tragedy, but don't tell anyone.

CAST

Vladimir - Camilo Carvajal
Estragón - Gadiel López
Pozzo - Eduard Gómez
Lucky - Leonardo Villa
Boy - Alexander Herrera

Leonardo Villa, Edward Gómez, Gadiel López and Camilo Carvajal as Lucky, Pozzo, Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. (Photo: Carlos Mario Lema)