On Waiting for Godot
“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?”
These words, uttered by Vladimir in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot sprang out at me last night. Watching the Wits’ End production of this iconic play, currently on at the Eleventh Hour theatre in Fitzroy.
It’s a lovely production. Clearly made by people who love and understand Beckett. Yes there is the existential turmoil. The sense of having to carry on despite the absolute absurdity of being human. There is also tenderness. A kind of gentle co-dependence between the tramps.
But what struck me most about my experience last night was how strong the echoes of the Second World War are in this play. The devastation and destruction that seems to be just around the corner, to wherever Pozzo and Lucky are headed and from wherever they return, blind, mute and unable to remember where they were just the day before.
The tramps know something terrible has happened or is happening but they seem paralysed, unable to act. This doesn’t mean they don’t care. They are concerned about both Pozzo and Lucky and for each other. But they are waiting for Godot. A man with a beard who beats one servant and feeds another well enough.
How these themes resonate now. Still. Always. Did we sleep while others suffered? Are we sleeping now?
There is something poignant and prescient too about the cast in this production. Four white men, all older, all with grey hair and aging bodies. One blusters through with absolute assurance, whipping his beast of burden. He then returns, blinded and bewildered but carrying on nonetheless. Meanwhile two others watch on. They know they really should move on but they don’t know how.
I can’t imagine Beckett intended the play as an allegory for the demise of the patriarchy but something about last night spoke of this to me. Of the absurdity and the ongoing damage of violence inherited from those hungry for a certain kind of power. Of how that is completely unsustainable for humanity. Of how it is the ‘others’ who are now busy-busy and who are most definitely the way of the future (the active, activists, those non-white-haired-white-skinned-old-men). Meanwhile those men are bewildered. They have lost something and they don’t know what to do next.
It’s not that simple of course it’s not. Because men quite unlike Beckett’s characters are still in control of so much. Still perpetuating extreme violence on a grand scale. And it’s not those men who live in wake of current global devastations. It’s still the ‘others’.
But there was something for me in this piece. “Why don’t we hang ourselves?” About what might be sitting under the surface of all the angry men gripping so tightly to their positions of power right now. A sense of terror about what has happened (Yes, what you did or what you allowed, what you slept through) and even greater fear about what is to come. (Will there be a place for me, how will I know what to do, who will tell me?)
Many of us know it’s not Godot we are waiting for. Those tramps may well get left behind. I hope, in a sense, they do. Waiting for the ghost of authoritarian maleness while the rest of us step forward into new ways of being, new voices being heard, new structures to live by.
I love Beckett’s writing, the way it can lift and curl and take different forms depending on context. I didn’t expect Waiting for Godot to deliver this new vision of itself and of the world. This is why his writing persists, I think.
And also, much credit to this production that delivered the text with such a skilled and light hand. I have no idea if any of what I got from the last night was intended by director William Henderson and his team.
But this is what theatre can do at its best. Allow space for the audience to be in the room. To see what they see. To make new meaning of old words. To make way for new beginnings.
Waiting for Godot is on until Saturday 16 December at Eleventh Hour, 170 Leicester Street, Fitzroy. All details here.
The Waiting Space
That scratchy place between one project and the next
I have just finished a new draft of big play and now need to let it settle until a workshop later in the year.
A novel manuscript is out in the world, a few agents reading it, I’ve no idea what they will think.
Got a short story rejection this morning after a few small wins. A reminder of that sting, oh yeah it’s not good enough, you’re not good enough.
For the first time in a long time I am not ‘mid’ a few big projects. I am waiting to see what will happen with them in the outside world.
I am not a waiter by nature.
This is probably why I write in so many forms and work on several things at once.
Right now I know I am at the start of a big new phase of work.
Ideas are scurrying inside my mind. I wrote each one down on a piece of orange paper the other night and laid them on my lounge room floor. Four potential novel ideas. Five new play ideas. Which to start on? Which has the pull? What should I consider? Having been in end-game mode on a novel and a play for a while now (into the polishing, the sending, the pitching, the re-drafting, the interfacing with the industry) I now feel stunted.
Stuck.
Can I just start a new project for the joy of it? Or do I need to plan now where it might fit, who might want it, where it sits within my bigger body of work. Which sub-sector of the publishing world or the theatre industry do I want to nudge towards?
Or should I just start and try to defer all those thoughts until later?
It feels like I imagine a phantom limb might. Something is bugging me, needs my attention, wants to be scratched but I don’t know what it is.
I feel distracted and incompetent and aware of the huge mountain of starting a few major new projects.
I feel like I don’t have the skills to make up anything new.
I don’t feel whole.
I know enough from experience to know that this itchiness, this discomfort is an important part of the process for me. It’s little things germinating but none solid enough yet to feel how they might grow.
So I tinker with old short stories, write notes about new characters popping into my head, start folders for projects that don’t yet exist.
It’s a kind of waiting but I fill it with activity.
I'm thinking, obsessing, over the best name for a new character, the best title for a non-existent new piece. I think while eating, while walking, while watching theatre, while working.
But it's not ready, yet, any of it, to really start writing.
I read a lot.
And sometimes I just wander around the house. Aimless. Restless. Not able to settle. Study. Kitchen. Lounge. Check the mail.
Aware that things will start to take shape, fall into place. Some of the seeds will sprout and I’ll know, soonish, which ones to nurture and move ahead with.
Until then, the prowl of the in-between writer. Vaguely scratching at thin air, waiting for clouds to form a picture, a mirage to firm up into view, the mountain to form so I can take the first step.
On the Cusp - a theatre response
This is a lot longer piece than I usually post but I wanted to share. I saw Yours the Face by Fleur Kilpatrick as part of Theatreworks FLIGHT Festival of new writing. Fleur, a playwright and arts writer, had written a wonderful response to Dream Home and she invited me to reciprocate. So I wrote this:
On the Cusp
A response from Emilie Collyer to Yours the Face by Fleur Kilpatrick and the audience in attendance on Friday 7th August 2015 at Theatreworks in Melbourne.
It’s unusual to see a group of teenagers in the front row of an independent theatre show on a Friday night. I sit behind them with a twinge of apprehension. Will they squirm, talk, or be hostile? I’ve read on social media that performer Roderick Cairns shares my apprehension. No mean feat to perform a solo show full stop. Let alone a solo show described as ‘gender bending’, containing full frontal nudity, to a school group, with most of them sitting in the front row. The show starts. Cairns strikes several model-esque poses. The students snicker, wriggle, settle in.
This shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of my response to Yours the Face, a play written by Fleur Kilpatrick, directed by Sarah Walker and performed by Roderick Cairns. It’s not a piece about how young people behave in the theatre. But this is what’s so wonderful and – at times – terrible about this form. We don’t watch in a vacuum. Our response is tainted by that of those around us. The giggles, restless legs, guffaws, silences, the latecomers, the person who really must eat that foil wrapped lolly because they apparently have no way of getting through a one hour show without sustenance – it’s all part and parcel.
I couldn’t help but partly watch Yours the Face through the eyes of the young people in front of me. I was aware this was an unusual, perhaps foreign experience for them. I have theatre audience training. I know what to expect and what to do with my body and my reactions if I am moved or startled or bored by a piece of theatre. What is so scary and brilliant about being in an audience with a group of young people is that they’re not yet quite as savvy about the rules.
The first character we meet is Emmy, a nineteen year old model. She’s American. So Cairns is playing cross gender, cross culture and cross accent. He does it without a hint of irony or apology. It is gentle, sinewy and subtle. The students in front of me are all boys so my frame for consuming the first five minutes of the piece is adult woman / teenage males / adult man / teenage girl. We’re all performing our roles, some of us safe in the dark, Cairns in full view.
This initial moment captures for me what is powerful about Yours the Face. There are many tangible, theatrical things to engage with in the work: writing, performance, lighting, choreography, sound, image. But what strikes me most is how the work as a whole facilitates a fluidity of experience. Its form is its content. It invites us to question what we see, how we create our frames, where we put our gaze. The structure of the show and Cairns’ performance demands this. In this way it offers the best of what theatre can do: provoke a lived experience in our bodies as we watch and therefore provoke a shift in how we see the world outside of theatre. Once we leave the space we are changed, simply by virtue of having our perceptions of reality (male / female / face / body / beauty) mixed up and messed with for an hour.
When Cairns flips to the second main character in the show – male photographer Peter – there is a palpable rumble of relief from the front row. They were fine with Emmy, they took her on board, but here, with Peter, they are more comfortable. Peter is blokey and direct. He’s funny. I’m pretty sure Cairns eyeballs a few of the front row. This is smart. Whether he does it in every show or his actor instincts kick in and he knows it will work in his favour to make a genuine, human connection with those in the audience least sure of how to react and what their relationship with him should be.
From here the show rockets along. As a writer I relish being witness to Kilpatrick’s skill in character creation and storytelling. In this regard there is something delightfully old-fashioned about the play. I don’t mean outdated or irrelevant. I mean ‘good old-fashioned story telling’ – create characters audiences connect with and put them in a situation where we want to know what happens next. Yours the Face is beautiful story telling. It’s warm and human. It has body and blood. It isn’t cynical or despairing or cold or clever for the sake of it. I am in a room with a writer who likes people. I sense her genuine curiosity about what makes us tick. She cares about us humans. She wants us to do well while being well aware of our flaws.
Kilpatrick writes about the fashion industry and the world of modelling in both a very obvious and a completely surprising way. The beauty, the emptiness, the photographer in love with beauty, the older man having sex with the young woman, these are things we expect or are at least familiar with via other narratives we see of this world. We can situate ourselves. We bring our own baggage and prejudices. We like beautiful images too but we know that what lies behind them can be ugly. We are in an arena that is part and parcel of our daily, image saturated lives.
What surprises is the humanity. The simple and fierce survival instinct of Emmy, the pragmatic romanticism of Peter. The hints of their lives that got them here and the waves of possible futures planted in the last few moments of the play – this is the stuff that lifts us, sideswipes us, takes us somewhere else. This is the stuff of all of us, regardless of what we do for a living or how much our faces are worth. We all try to connect and find a place to belong. The play doesn’t slam the fashion industry, it doesn’t judge the people who work in it. We are presented with moments, images and pictures that allow us to build our own meaning.
My front row friends continue to react verbally and physically through the show. Yes they squirm a bit when Cairns takes off his clothes. But not for long. The strength in the writing, the direction and Cairns’ performance leave no room for awkwardness. Here is a body, we are being invited to look at it. Again, form and content marry. In popular culture the male gaze is privileged. Images we see, from fashion pages to cinema, from catalogues to billboards, television ads to product endorsements have been, still are – on the whole – created by and seen through a male lens. To be specific (although perhaps less so in high fashion than other more commercial endeavours) a male, white, cis lens.
During the nude section in Yours the Face, the audience is cast in this role. We are gazing at a male body as it morphs between a male and female gender. This body is appealing to look at. It’s long, lithe, and muscular. The key difference between this interaction and our usual interactions with images is that in this one the subject – Cairns – is active, not passive. We are consuming him but he is in control of how he presents his body. This kind of nudity invites connection not objectification. He is three dimensional, not flat. This is theatre, it’s live and it’s a conversation, a dynamic, between actor and audience. We’re in it together.
The characters we meet in Yours the Face are not queer. But the very fact of watching the two (and more) characters inhabit one body invites certain shifts in awareness and gaze. We see that of course a vulnerable female energy can be present in a male body, a male face with hair can voice the pain of having sharply beautiful features. The form and the embodiment of the piece opens up alternative ways of seeing and experiencing gender.
As the play enters its final third something shifts in the audience. I put it down to three key elements. The first is that we hear the characters talk about a couple of key moments in their past. We are once more in the world of ‘old fashioned’ story telling. It’s powerful. We’ve come to know these characters through their actions. At just the right moment Kilpatrick then deepens our connection with them by allowing them to reveal something of their past. In each of the stories there is a moment that shows a weakness, a vulnerability or an act of cruelty.
Second is that one of the characters, in the here and now of the play, performs an action that also has elements of cruelty, selfishness, amorality.
Third is that the ending is left open. These two people have met, they’ve impacted each other, but that’s it. A moment in time. Any kind of future might unfold for these characters.
The thing that shifts in the audience? The students in front of me are all leaning forward in their seats and they are completely silent. They’ve been invited in. I don’t know if they are conscious of it, but the play and the performance are generous enough to make space and say to us: You are part of this. There are gaps in this narrative for a reason. Theatre is where we start conversations but we don’t finish them. I sense that by the end of the play the young people in the front row really care about these characters and they want to know what will happen to them. I also think they care about the actor. They respect what he has done and want to show their appreciation for that too.
After the show I try to catch some of the conversations between the students. One stands out to me. A young woman telling her friend that at the moment when Peter was describing how he let a bee sting him and then photographed it as it died, she thought that in the play, at that moment, it would be revealed that Emmy was dead. I could hear her excitement at making meaning from the image, and the fact that the play offered, time and again, these clues and then subverted them delighted rather than frustrated her.
I don’t think Yours the Face was specifically written with young people in mind. But by the end I see it is a perfect piece for this audience. Teenagers are smart and they live so fully in the world. They have opinions about models and beauty, fashion and images, sex and love. They also have bodies and they are right on the cusp of those bodies becoming part of the adult world, of work and trade and value and betrayal and ambition. This play pulls no punches and offers no easy answers. Rather it opens up a plethora of conversations and meditations on what all of that might mean.
As I leave the theatre I am happy to have been in this audience on this night. It makes me think that this is how we should always approach both making and attending theatre. As if we are on the cusp of change, as if transformation is possible, as if a new way of seeing the world is about to open up.
Blog Hop!
So I've been invited to blog hop by Beau Hillier who blog hopped last week. Thanks Beau! You can read Beau's post here. In turn, I have invited two wonderful writers, Demet Divaroren and Andy Jackson to join the hop. So go visit their blog pages in the next week or two and see how they Hop To It.
My answers to the 4 Blog Hop questions are below:
What are you working on at the moment?
The main thing at the moment is a new play for Melbourne Fringe Festival called Once Were Pirates. It's a dark comedy about two men who used to be pirates but are stuck in the real world now and have to figure out how to live. One way to describe it would be a cross between Samuel Beckett and Pirates of the Caribbean. Other than that I am currently in the midst of a novel called The Looking Glass Spy which is about an ordinary woman who falls into a spy novel and finds she is the main character.
How do you think your work differs from that of other writers in your genre?
Well you can see a theme in those two works - crossing genres and mixing fantasy with reality. Nearly all of my work has a speculative bent and I like to blend, mix or twist genres. For example I like playing with pop culture genres when writing theatre (in 2013 I wrote a sci-fi play called The Good Girl). I explore existential questions via my short stories, plays and novels. I dig deep and try to stretch myself and the reader to question how we look at the world and why. I think genre is a great way to do this. It gives me a framework to start with that I can then push the boundaries of. It's also a lot of fun to find new ways to create worlds and bend rules.
Why do you write what you write?
I write from a place of asking questions. Often these start with: What If ... and that's where the speculative element comes in. Some of my writing comes from a deeply personal place of questioning my own life or things that I've experienced. But I also respond to the world around me, moral and ethical questions, social trends and mores. I want to connect with people. I want to ask questions that I don't know the answers to. I want to create imagined worlds where characters and readers can play.
What's your writing process, and how does it work?
I am usually working on several pieces at once, either in different forms and / or at different phases. I write pretty quickly and try to complete whole drafts of things then I go back and re-draft and re-draft. In that re-drafting phase I may also plan a little more carefully - especially for longer form works like plays or novels. It takes me a draft (at least) to work out what it is I am exploring in a piece, where the heart is and what the shape of it should be. I'm interested in shifting how I work and experimenting with more planning up front to see how this might affect my work. I try and write every day but not in a regimented way, more to ensure I am keeping my skills honed and also that I am staying connected to the pieces I am working on.
Thanks for reading! And remember to check out Demet and Andy's posts in the coming few weeks ...
Demet Divaroren was born in Adana, Turkey and migrated to Australia with her family when she was six months old. She writes fiction and non-fiction and is the co-editor of the anthology, Coming of Age: Growing up Muslim in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 2014). Demet’s writing has appeared in Island magazine, Scribe’s New Australian Stories, The Age Epicure, The Big Issue, and was commended in the Ada Cambridge Biographical Prose Prize 2013. Her first novel, Orayt?, was shortlisted for the Australian Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.
Demet is the recipient of an Australia Council Artstart Grant, a Rosebank Residential Writing Fellowship, a Varuna Fellowship for a Writing Retreat and a Glenfern Grace Marion Wilson Fellowship. She is the Artist in Residence at Deer Park Art Spaces and has appeared as a panelist, guest speaker and workshop leader at literary festivals, universities, and schools across Melbourne. Demet is currently writing her memoir, aided by an Australia Council Jump Mentoring Grant. She is represented by Curtis Brown Literary Agents.
Andy Jackson has performed at dozens of events and festivals (including The Age Melbourne Writers Festival, Prakriti Poetry Festival [in Chennai, India], Goa Literary & Arts Festival, Australian Poetry Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Clifden Arts Festival [Ireland], Newcastle Young Writers Festival and Overload Poetry Festival), had poems published in a variety of print and on-line journals, been awarded grants from the Australia Council and Arts Victoria, been the recipient of an Australian Society of Authors mentorship, and self-published two collections of poetry. He has been awarded residencies from Victorian Writers Centre, Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre (Perth) and Asialink. He is also an infrequent collaborator with musicians, sound artists and other writers.
His first full-length collection of poems, Among the Regulars,was published by papertiger media in 2010 – this book was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry (the Kenneth Slessor Prize) and Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award. A collaborative puppetry-poetry performance with Rachael Wenona Guy entitled Ambiguous Mirrors won the City of Yarra Award for Most Innovative Work at the Overload Poetry Festival in 2009. He won the 2008 Arts ACT Rosemary Dobson Award for Best Unpublished Poem for Secessionist. In 2013, he won the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. The resulting collection of poems – the thin bridge - has just recently been released. Another collection – Immune systems: Poems and Ghazals on India & Medical Tourism – is forthcoming in 2015 from Transit Lounge.
Andy has the genetic condition Marfan Syndrome. He is currently based in Melbourne.