This of course explains why the inside of the back cover of my copy of “Waiting for Godot” is completely unmarked.
Word of the day: Threnody – “a poem, speech, or song of lamentation, esp. for the dead; dirge; funeral song.” – dictionary.com
Example: “Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, is one of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished; a play suffused with tenderness for the blah blah blah.” – The London Times
I might have written a different review, something closer to, “Waiting for Godot is a threnody for your hopes of the modern theater....”
As you are probably aware if you know anything at all about the play, it has no plot, which means it is supposed to be driven by “character” and “dialogue.” Unfortunately, both of these suck too.
So that, if you are ever assigned this play, you will know the entirety of its contents, here is an abridged version:
First lines: “Nothing to be done.” This is “Estragon’s” refrain (not that he is ever called this in the dialogue; nor is any character addressed by their actual name through the dialogue, so that an audience not reading the play would know who they are without having to look at a pamphlet, nor can you even say with certainty that there are different characters in the play).
Vladimir responds: “It’s too much for one man.”
Estragon tries to get his shoes off. “Help me,” he says.
Vladimir, being a jackass, asks, “It hurts?”
Estragon becomes angry, fed up with his unhelpful and unfriendly friend. “Hurts!” he cries. He wants to know if it hurts!”
Vladimir, being both a jackass and insecure, says, “No one ever suffers but you. I don’t count. I’d like to hear what you’d say if you had what I have.”
Estragon asks: “It hurts?”
Vladimir responds: “Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!”
[59 additional pages of this]
Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move. Final curtain.
Oh, okay, fine, there are two other “characters” of “interest.” There’s Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo is Lucky’s master, and Lucky is treated as less than a slave—as barely an inanimate object. Lucky has the best role in the play, being the only one to do ever do anything—dancing once for the entertainment of the others.
But seriously, that is the entire play. The cover lies. It is not a “tragicomedy in two acts.” It is “an hour of your life you won’t get back, divided by a curtain.”
Of course, the real trick of Waiting for Godot is that, in academic circles, it is yet another example of the thumb on the nose and the two winks. “Oh yes, of course,” you expect to hear from one student in the classroom. “I found the language beautiful and moving. Really, its phrases come like a sharp stab of beauty and pain.” The first thing to realize when you hear such a comment is: This of course is the professor’s way of knowing who the biggest suck-up in the class is; who has no actual interest in anything at all, but really wants an A, even at the cost of their soul. The second thing to know when you hear such a comment is that the speaker is plagiarizing the review from The London Times.
What distinguishes Waiting for Godot from other plays is that Beckett succeeds in making a play that has no plot whatsoever; this differs from the norm of plays of having next to no plot.
Take The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky. Gorky’s “masterpiece” has next to no plot. It does have more plot than Beckett, but not much more. The difference being that Maxim Gorky’s capacity to write, even in translation, comes through much more than Beckett.
Gorky is much more enjoyable to read than Beckett; yet, a problem emerges after reading it. Perhaps not immediately, but a few weeks later you might see it lying around and think: what was that about? You can maybe remember the physical act of reading it, where you read it (on a plane perhaps), yet… yet… who was in it? What happened?
Gorky himself overshadows his play. Born Alexey Maximovich Peshkov in 1868, says the timeline on the first page, Gorky changed his name (which means “The Bitter”) for the sake of his art. When he was 16 in 1884, he dreamed of setting up a Tolstoyan commune and was invited to become a police spy. “Studies the violin, tries to fall in love, fails at both.” At nineteen he tries to commit suicide and succeeds in damaging his left lung.
In 1889 he succeeds in falling in love with a married woman, Olga, and three years later runs away with her. By 1899 he had met Checkhov, who in turn introduced him to Tolstoy, who offends him. In 1902 he is exiled by the police to Arzamas and finishes The Lower Depths.
In 1905 is involved with Gapon in organizing the workers’ march on the Winter Palace. Two days after the ‘Bloody Sunday’ slaughter, he is arrested. He gets bailed out by a power-mad industrialist who wanted to buy the revolution.
Pursued by the police, he flees to Finland. Travels Europe for decades, sponged on by other exiles. In 1928, Stalin invites Gorky to return to Russia.
In 1934, his son is liquidated, and in 1936, Gorky himself dies for reasons never explained. By the end of the year, everyone who attended his funeral is also dead.
In other words, reading the timeline of the author’s life resulted in more fascination, learning, and interest, than the entirety of anything Beckett ever wrote.
Considering the life of Gorky easily upstages his own play, it only follows that the legacy of the play might be more interesting than the play itself.
Some of the censor’s demanded cuts for the play: “It is absolutely essential to change the policeman Medvediev into an ordinary retired soldier, since the participation of a custodian of the law in the escapades of the inmates of a doss house is inadmissible on the stage… Cuts are required in the speeches of the pilgrim—in particular his remarks concerning God, the after-life, deception, and so on…”
Checkhov admired the play, but “to others he gave the opinion that it would have been better treated as a short story and that he didn’t like Gorky behaving ‘like a priest’.”
Gorky himself saw his audience as a little too accepting of the façade some of his characters put on. Luka’s reception in particular bothered him. Although Luka likes to put himself out as an embodiment of brotherly love, he nonetheless provides no real support for his ostensible friends in the doss house.
Now, when you get right down to it, how do you summarize “The Lower Depths.” The truth is you don’t. The play is a string of character rants combined with horrid acts of violence that are as jarring as they are inexplicable. It is a melodrama, complete with twist ending. And as such, like most melodramas, it is often difficult to remember specific characters as individual entities.
Those who stand out in memory are those who are comical or dramatically unusual. Take Tartar, for instance, a ‘hook-man.’ His one line, “What law say okay kill in daytime?” pretty much made this play for me.
Second word of the day: samovar -- a metal urn, used esp. by Russians for heating water for making tea. (dictionary.com)
As in:
“Kvashnia: Look what the brutes did! Scalded the girl’s legs with boiling water!
Nastya: Tipped the samovar over her.”
It is difficult to remember, particularly for me, with limited experience with Russian names, to remember one of the dozens of Russian characters in this play. So, unsurprisingly, it is “The Actor” who steals the show, as can be attested in this early exchange:
“Actor: One of these times they do you in, they’ll do you in for good.
Satin: And you are an imbecile.
Actor: Why?
Satin: Because you can’t be done in more than once.
Actor: (after a pause) I don’t understand. Why can’t you?”
And as for summarizing what the play is really about, I think one line by Bubnov gives a better idea than any critic:
“Conscience? Me? What for? I’m not rich.”
Fun fact: my translation includes the word “debilitution” which I can not find in any dictionary whatsoever. I can only assume they typo’d “debilitation.” Not Gorky’s fault, he didn’t translate it. It also includes the word “scyllaritdis” (She’s worse than a scyllaritdis) which I think they just made up.
Third word of the day: Loam – “a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.”
As in: “The little woman here’s dying, her lips are already tasting the loam.”
Luka’s anecdote in Act Three is also phenomenal, but this review is already all over the place and it’s probably time to move on.
As a closing remark, let me just say that for a play filled with long Russian names, all of the most memorable characters had names with exactly two syllables.
So far I have explored two experiments in “low plot” plays with two extremes of success—Beckett’s not-a-play play that I won’t bother naming again, and Gorky’s phenomenal but difficult to remember “The Lower Depths.”
Both shared one thing in common—articulating what exactly they are about was difficult and open to interpretation (well, maybe I’m being generous to “Waiting for Godot” here).
The polar opposite of this extreme, then, is Bertolt Brecht. Brecht is a curious figure because I read one of his critical essays, not even knowing he was a playwright, and then went on discover that he is a much, much better playwright than he is critical thinker.
I started with “The Life of Galileo.” This is not Brecht’s best work, and part of that is because it comes with his “introduction” to the play. You can just tell that Brecht was wearing a beret and smoking cigars the entire time he was writing this play and its introduction. Also, he was probably hungry.
You can instantly tell what this play is about, if not from the title and your background knowledge of Brecht (being among the “postmarxist crowd” of the first half of the twentieth century), then certainly by this line in the introduction:
“For the theatre it is important to understand that this play must lose a great part of its effect if its performance is directed chiefly against the Catholic Church.”
At that point, you can be damned certain that this play is without a doubt about Brecht’s disgust with the Catholic Church.
When Brecht talks about this version versus the original, Brecht says, “we had to make only a few alterations… Already in the original version the Church was portrayed as a secular authority, its ideology as, fundamentally, interchangeable with many others.” Uh huh. You can tell how much Brecht respects and understands a Church when he says that its “ideology” is a “secular authority” and is “fundamentally interchangeable with many others.” This sort of off-the-cuff dismissal and overgeneralization of “the Church” is something that almost exclusively can be directed to the Catholic Church. Few churches, after all, insist on their own universality quite as much as the Catholic Church does. And of course, there is the Catholic Church’s colorful (if overplayed and Eurocentric) history… which Brecht plays in to.
Finally, there is Brecht’s “postmodernism” which is the stuff that stage workers and producers loathe (after all, their whole job is to mix it up and keep it fresh for the audience). Brecht, however, insists on his first opening note, “The stage décor must not be such that the public believes itself to be in a room in mediaeval Italy or in the Vatican. The public must remain always clearly aware that it is in a theatre.”
At this point, you reach the actual text of the play. However, if you read the introduction, and you have even an inkling of the history of Galileo, there is going to be little surprise or drama in this play. The only question remains is: how well does Brecht pull it off?
The play starts with Galileo half-naked ordering his assistant, “Put the milk on the table. But don’t shut any of my books.”
Like many of the scenes in the play, if I was the director, I would probably cut it.
In deft fairness to the introduction, Brecht does try to make the play seem less about the Catholic church and more about authority. Much of Galileo’s early hatred falls along the lines of this remark from “The Curator” (one of the first of many almost completely unremarkable and nearly unnecessary characters):
“In those places people must not know how a stone falls, only what Aristotle writes on the subject. Eyes are just for reading.”
I think the epitome of Brecht’s sense of what constitutes a “subtle metaphor” comes when Galileo’s assistant and one of the boys from the court begin wrestling over two toy models of the solar system; the Ptolemaic and the Copernican.
The Ptolemaic falls to the floor and breaks as they wrestle.
In case you didn’t get it by actually watching it happen, later “The Theologian” looks down to the broken Ptolemaic model on the floor and says: “Something seems to have got broken here.”
Wink wink nudge nudge. Get it? That conceptual “model” of the universe is “broken”. Brecht is so clever I could just die.
However, perhaps Brecht’s literal-mindedness is not a bad thing, for if anything it is a sad case study in how literal-minded people can be. Barberini’s argument in Scene Seven that, “’The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to his place where he arose.’ So saith Ecclesiastes, the Preacher” comes after many of the most obnoxious arguments that Brecht presents. Nonetheless, it is one that echoes perhaps the most today. Some of the most beautiful poetry of the Bible can always be corrupted into becoming a mind-numbing headache should you try to interpret it literally and pretend that it is an accurate model for the physical characteristics of the universe. (Yummy, that sentence even after I edited to be shorter is still a mouthful.)
Of course, the insight of the play would be surely dwarfed under the hands of a “generous” director that did not cut certain paragraphs—or in some cases, entire scenes. Scene Eight has only the description “A conversation” whereas most of the other scenes have plot. Scene Eight is a five page wall of text—not dialogue, no one has ever, or will ever, seriously be able to talk so monotonously.
You might wonder why I would talk positively about Brecht and then being by describing “The Life of Galileo.” That’s because if I described “The Life of Galileo” first, my description of Brecht would be tragic. I prefer an upward journey, for after “The Life of Galileo” I moved on to the joy that is “The Threepenny Opera.”
Featuring: Mack The Knife
That’s right. The Prologue to The Threepenny Opera has classic covers by Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and Louis Armstrong.
Sure, the play has one of the worst dues ex machina’s I’ve ever read. Sure, the play has some of the most interchangeable characters ever—but Brecht makes it work; their interchangeability is of course the point. But you just can’t top Mack The Knife.
And of course, it helps that “Act One, Scene One” should be required reading for everyone in Berkeley—especially the bums.
I really don’t need to say too much more into The Threepenny Opera, other than to say “Read It!” It’s fantastic, and even the atrocious dues ex machine at the end can be forgiven when it serves a most beautiful function: to fully demonstrate the absolute absurdity of any attempts Brecht makes in the afterward for the “function of the theater” or to expunge his Marxist ideals. When Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera, he was having fun, and it shows.
