"WAITING FOR GODOT" AT COMÉDIE DE CAEN #7

“Rehearsing a show also means this: to like coincidences, laugh at our weaknesses, play at being a chemist, hope for alchemy and provoke involuntary catastrophes”. Below is an antidote to the wait: a few anecdotes gathered by Jean Lambert-wild, Lorenzo Malaguerra and Marcel Bozonnet, the three directors of the show that opens in exactly one week.

 

A recalcitrant folding chair

In “Waiting for Godot”, the stage looks like a desert. This is only partly true because Beckett imagines a plethora of props that the actors use throughout the play: a pipe, a suitcase, a handkerchief, the notorious bowler hats, a watch, a rope, a spray, etc.

 

One prop in particular, the folding chair, turned out to be a real pain for the props workshop. Pozzo uses this chair to sit down during his long scene, so it needs to be solid – so that the actor doesn’t accidentally fall off –, easy to open (a folding chair’s main characteristic) and convenient to carry for Lucky who is already loaded with a coat, a suitcase and has a rope tied around his neck. We thought: the Comédie de Caen’s props workshop has seen worse! But we might have been wrong: we had to go through ten different chairs before finally finding the right one. A fall, pinched fingers, recalcitrant mechanism, a stool that is too low, a backrest that is uncomfortable… in short, the nine folding chairs that we are not using are now available at a competitive price…!

 

A whoopee cushion…

We were rehearsing the famous scene where Pozzo farts and, backstage, our stage manager was trying to operate a whoopee cushion (theatre can be so trivial sometimes) when Marcel Bozonnet, former administrator of Comédie Française, who had been lying on the stage for the past two hours, told us an anecdote. An elderly actor played the part of Polonius in Antoine Vitez’s production of Hamlet. It was a really beautiful production, with a majestic stage design by Yannis Kokkos, a prestigious cast, and a running time of close to five hours, which is something. At one point, Hamlet kills Polonius through a curtain. A few minutes later, a very light snore started, which then increased in intensity and filled the Elsinore castle while the other actors aloofly crossed the stage, causing general hilarity. As we were heartily laughing at this story, a marvellous fart emerged from backstage and provoked hysterical laughter, which we will remember for a while.

 

 

Shoes next to ice cubes

Since magic is Jean Lambert-wild’s second passion, or maybe even his first, there are a few tricks in our production. We won’t say a thing about them, apart from this: the shoes that Estragon takes off, at the end of Act 1, appear again in Act 2, in the same place but in a different colour. We could have easily done this by changing them during the interval. But this would be too easy an answer to please Jean and his team. The challenge was to find a way of changing the shoes’ colour in real time, without external intervention. We had to find a type of paint that reacts according totemperature. Theatre is an empirical art form: we now know that at up to 10˚C, the paint stays opaque, turning the shoes black, but that from 10˚C, it becomes transparent, turning the shoes a beautifully bright yellow. For this metamorphosis to happen over twenty minutes and be revealed at the same time the actors say the line about the shoes’ colour, the shoes are kept in the freezer and taken out at the last minute. The bars of the venues where the show will tour might be surprised to find a pair of shoes next to their ice cubes. 

 

On Thursday, as Michel Bohiri exclaims “Horrified!”, an ear-splitting fire alarm started and chased us away from the Théâtre, hiccupping with laughter.

 

Rehearsing a show also means this: to like coincidences, laugh at our weaknesses, play at being a chemist, hope for alchemy and provoke involuntary catastrophes. 

 

Last weekend, we went on a walk in Calvados and we walked past the “Pozzo” garage, close to a locality which name translates as The Plank, on the road to The Pit. Beckett’s ghost appears to us, even on our day off…

 

EN ATTENDANT GODOT - Carnet de bord # 7

François Royet

Show

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