"WAITING FOR GODOT" AT COMÉDIE DE CAEN #1

Over a month, we invite you to witness in real-time the creative process of “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett, directed by Jean Lambert-wild, Lorenzo Malaguerra and Marcel Bozonnet. Until the show’s opening on 18 March 2014, these three theatre artists will share with you their work, their joys, their doubts. Join us and follow them in this beautiful adventure!

 

 

 

Along the way some of them get caught in places with no identity, for all sorts of reasons: waiting for a people smuggler, for a visa, waiting to be sent back, waiting for a sister or a son. These situations, in which the need to stay obscures the end goal, bring us back to Waiting for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon could be these migrants, stuck on a road or under a tree, waiting for that indispensable something or someone that will take them elsewhere, towards the life they dream of. They are beings who invent games, dialogues, friends, moons, nights and days, to make the unbearable bearable.

 

For several months, we also experimented with waiting for a visa for Michel Bohiri, the Ivorian actor who plays Vladimir. We finally obtained one, after a sustained battle in high places. The lack of respect that the consular administration showed him would have seemed unacceptable to any of us. And yet, such a wait seems to be commonplace for many African women and men. 

We have witnessed the Swiss vote, which proposes to limit the amount not only of foreign workers, but also refugees, families and anyone who, for a reason or another, would like to migrate to that country. We know Switzerland as a rich country, untouched by the financial crisis thanks to its intelligent administration, its entrepreneurs’ creativity and its banks’ wealth. But now, the country is turning into a ground for experimentations, as if Beckett and Kafka had joined forces to create an infernal bureaucratic machine. Didn’t Friedrich Dürrenmatt, one of Swiss’ most famous authors, once said in a discourse addressed to Vaclav Havel that the Swiss people were both the inmates and the wardens of their prison?

 

Isn’t this a magnificent way of defining the situation Vladimir and Estragon are in, as they bounce up and down and can neither stay nor leave? Vladimir and Estragon, clowns in spite of themselves, prisoners of their wait but wardens of this unbearable wait that has also become their only hope. This is the world we live in, this is the challenge our theatre work has to face.

EN ATTENDANT GODOT - Carnet de bord # 1

François Royet

Show

Waiting for Godot resonates very clearly today. During these times of migratory movements, when whole populations are...