One afternoon last October, I boarded a bus at the village of Glasson in the Irish Midlands for a two-hour, cross-country drive to a small town in County Cavan. The bus had “Waiting for Godot” emblazoned on the sides and, for passing helicopters, on top. In it were the cast and crew of the Gate Theatre’s Waiting for Godot, somewhere towards the end of what could alternately be described as a 40-night or a 20-year tour.
The Gate’s Godot was first staged in 1988, directed by Walter Asmus, who had assisted Beckett on a legendary production at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1974-75. Based on Asmus’s notes from that production, it became an iconic production itself. It has been revived periodically since and this tour was conceived as a celebration both of the production and of the Gate Theatre, which last year celebrated its 80th anniversary. The night I joined them, at the Ramor Theatre in Virginia, County Cavan, the box office had a waiting list of 36 for a theatre seating just 200.
There was less of a clamour for tickets, and less of an air of celebrity, about the production of Endgame I saw in the Wicklow mountains this February. It was an icy night, and many of those who saw it had spent much of the previous week snowed in. Yet this was a production of similar pedigree to the Gate’s Godot: it was by the Godot Company, a touring theatre company set up by John Calder, who for over 30 years was Beckett’s friend and was the British publisher of his prose. Like Walter Asmus, Calder gleaned his formative insights accompanying Beckett at rehearsals. Like Asmus’s Godot, too, this was a rigorously faithful production, informed by Beckett’s own history of directing it and the extraordinary visual motifs of his text: the old couple in the ashcans; the man with blackened glasses in the homemade wheelchair.
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