Masters of the absurd

LAST week's news item about the shebra (the stripey offspring of a liaison between a zebra and a Shetland pony) set me wondering about the status of other hybrid animals. Has anyone tried to cross a hippopotamus with a Widdecombe, thus producing a widdepotanus? Then how about crossing the widdepotanus with a hamster, and getting a twoton creature that could run around inside the London Eye? And if you crossed an edentate mammal of the dasypodidae family with an Ann Summers' vibrator, would the result be an armadildo?

Risible though the shebra foal may appear, it's blissfully unaware of the absurdity of its situation, and of its own mortality (which is probably just as well, because Parisian chevalines are doubtless already exploring the potential benefits of selling meat that comes with its own bar code).

Human beings, however, are all too conscious of the futility of their own existence, and no matter how much we try to distract ourselves (be it with alcohol, art, religion, or evening classes in macram), we all know that life is a sexually-transmitted disease with 100 per cent mortality, and that we're all spending our days walking up a down escalator, patiently awaiting our own annihilation. Some have exhorted us to rage against the dying of the light, while others maintain that there is a meaning, if only we have faith, but Samuel Beckett devoted his life to a detailed exploration of hopelessness, and of our slow descent into senility and unknowingness.

Indeed, many of his central characters seem to be battling in their forgetfulness against incipient Alzheimer's, an illness easily confused with an existential approach to life (and, incidentally, also enables you to play "hunt the thimble" by yourself so it's not all bad).

Beckett's oeuvre falls into the category of works that everyone wants to have read, but few are prepared to read, so Channel 4 deserves credit (along with the Irish broadcaster RTE) for vowing to bring all 19 of the author's stage plays to the screen. The ratings will undoubtedly be modest, but it's only by committing to such ambitious and significant projects as this that the channel can justify its desire to remain unprivatised, and showing Waiting for Godot for two hours on Saturday evening (with only one commercial break, between the two acts) was a brave move that put principle above profit. First performed in the early Fifties, the written instructions are so specific and detailed that the director's job isn't to interpret, but to reproduce as faithfully as possible, and Michael Lindsay-Hogg succeeded superbly, with a fine cast from Dublin's Gate Theatre. Nevertheless, I doubt if it tempted many viewers away from Bruce's Price is Right or the National Lottery, because despite the work's many virtues, it's hard to argue with the observation of the Irish critic Vivian Mercier, who noted after its first performance in English that "nothing happens ... twice."

Having last watched the play in its entirety some 20 years ago, the half-remembered allegorical details pointed out to me in those far-off programme notes soon came flooding back. Vladimir and Estragon (vividly and touchingly portrayed by Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy) were symbolic of impoverished humanity, waiting trustingly for the Saviour to arrive, but we non-believers knew Godot would never come, partly because we'd already read the ending, but also because atheism is a nonprophet-making organisation. Too apathetic and unresourceful even to hang themselves from the Orphic tree (even though "it might give us an erection ... with all that follows"), they were tormented by the unremitting bleakness of their situation and their inability to alter their destiny, yet they were still admirably prepared to embark on farcical comedy routines worthy of Brian Rix at the drop of a trouser. And who can forget Pozzo's harrowing climactic speech in Act II: "they give birth astride of a grave"? What a lousy midwife he would have made.

PURISTS may say Godot was conceived for the stage, and belongs only there, but the tormented close-ups and intelligent cutting more than compensated for the sparse and static setting. Fifty years on, this remains one of the seminal works of "absurdist" theatre (in Camus's sense of the word, depicting men out of harmony with their universe), and it's a miracle that it received such a high-profile transmission, not just because of commercial pressures, but also because of the technical problems of recording many forms of modern drama. For example, I once called the BBC Drama Department, hoping to get a recording of a Dadaist play. "Have you got a cassette copy?" I asked. "No," they replied. "Not for Dadaist plays. You can't get them on cassette. We've only got them on reel-to-unreal tape." Perhaps you had to be there, but I bet Beckett would have seen the funny side.

Copyright 2001
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