CREDIT: Peter Mould

Highly Stylised Clowning says Jenny Miller

Waiting for Godot, from being the scandalous and outrageous debut to Samuel Beckett’s prodigious theatre life, has become a canon of theatre literature. Is it even relevant to ask who is Godot and why are they waiting for him? The play was a ground-breaking moment in cultural time. The problem now is that the very title is freighted with worthiness. Furthermore, the production of any Beckett play is heavily protected by the family – directors have to forswear virtually any deviation from the set, stage and script. If the author placed a dead tree on stage, then dead tree there will be. Not unreasonable perhaps, but it can have a stultifying effect on directors and actors.

In Hastings’ tiny Stables theatre, world famous director David Glass invoked the world of music-hall, vaudeville, clowning and slap-stick and shook the text and action out of A-level mummification and into direct life. All five characters: Pozzo, Vladimir, Estragon Lucky and Boy, used highly stylised clowning and movement vocabulary in great detail and to strong effect. Lighting was used non-naturalistically to shift focus and to shock. The floorcloth was particularly effective in giving us faintly outlined shapes of bodies that could read as crime scene outlines or as cave paintings, making the ambition of the production clear from the outset. This was a grass-roots, direct to the audience, emotionally engaging, far removed from a reverential West End, production.

CREDIT: Peter Mould

A Marmite Muppet Show wonders Caf Fean

Theatre Nation burst back onto the boards with Waiting for Godot. A long time in the planning, paused by the pandemic, the performance took a great gasp and heaved itself up from the ashes. Brim-full with bitterness, loneliness, lightness, madness and a dollop of grotesque, my response feels a little muppet show: I loved it! It was a triumph! I hated it! It was too painful! It’s impossible to extract the show from the players, or the players from the show. The clowning and physical performance were top-notch. The text itself: timeless, repetitive, challenging, annoying, heart rending, but most of all, real.

Remember those Goyas the Chapman Brothers scribbled over with clown faces? They’ve come to life: shouting, muttering, staggering, stuttering, sweating, wrestling, following one another endlessly, showering themselves in mud. Dressed in tatters, with Irish accents. 

Oh. My. God. So funny. A scene would be played, then all players freeze-frame, Vaudeville style. The physicality of the performance was incredible, and the slapstick was excellently executed. Like watching a sad, merry dance, on repeat. 

I loved how the off-scene characters were always at the edges, looking in, reacting to the action. Watching felt claustrophobic, voyeuristic, incredibly joyful: like being in the belly of a huge mud-monster, breathing dry earth in and out, and laughing at its own futility, fragility – the ridiculousness of
it all. 

When will this end? Are we here forever? Poor lads, having to play this night after night. Heavily, huffingly homoerotic. So many stretches, shuddering breaths, thrusts and waggles. Such … a lot of … innuendo. Laid on like a thick slab of salted butter on soda bread. 

Lucky’s silken slip, his sub-missive nature … what are they saying (or not saying) about women? Whip-wielding Pozzo… amusing and irritating in equal measure. 

It brought echoes of the deep sadness of lockdown to me. I didn’t ever want to taste that again. But I didn’t want to leave either. I wanted to see how it would all unfold.  Did I enjoy it? I endured it. And I’m glad I did.  Art isn’t meant to be ‘nice’

CREDIT: Peter Mould

Glyn Carter sees a Sandbox of Isolation and Pain

Beckett told the world not to look for the subtext of Waiting For Godot; sound advice to actors, directors and audiences. Just accept. Take it as it comes, because to analyse idiocy is a task for fools. Theatre Nation’s production is something of a coup to have eminently fitting talents of the internationally renowned David Glass as director.

Beckett delivers random happenings to Vladimir and Estragon, and takes them precisely nowhere as they wait in hope and resignation for Godot. Glass adds a layer of unpredictability like sprinkled hundreds and thousands, through the techniques of physical theatre and commedia dell’arte. Characters endlessly swap hats like clowns, Pozzo changes his accent from English brigadier to Yank, Scot and Irish – lazzi jokes and diversions built into performances that have little bearing on the story. 

Not that Godot has a story. The play hangs on the energy between Vladimir and Estragon, who lie on a continuum between Laurel and Hardy, Keaton, and Chaplin, and Spike Milligan and Monty Python. Billy Clarke and Patrick Kealey bring out the pair’s pathos, their fear of being alone, their co-dependence and their childishness. 

Henry Maynard, as the bombastic monster Pozzo, commands the stage like a Shakespeare tragedian, yet he is a hollow vessel, as purposeless as the two tramps. 

Francois Terstory is extra-ordinary as the unfortunate Lucky, Pozzo’s slave. Experience working with the legendary Lindsay Kemp gave Terstory’s movement and dance, and his crystal water-
fall stream of consciousness monologue, almost angelic transcendence … before he is noosed once more.

Jack Norris’s Boy brings messages from Godot with the energy of a cocaine-fuelled clockwork canary, utters random beeps, and feeds prompts from the wings whether the actors need them or no. 

Staging is minimal, as Beckett directed. Lighting effects show night and day, but also mood and tone, and if we don’t know blue signifies evening or chagrin.  

Despite Beckett’s instruction we do look for meaning because we humans are wired that way. Beckett knew this, and knew exactly what he was doing with Vladimir’s perplexity about the gospels’ veracity. God-oh, if he exists, is coming tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. Life and the universe itself have no purpose. Our post-pandemic nihilistic culture must grapple with the same questions Beckett did after the Second World War. 

Theatre Nation’s production makes no attempt to make sense of the senseless. What it does so brilliantly is to delve for the humour, fraternity, and consolations that do – yes they do – hide in our universal sandbox of isolation and pain.

Samuel Barclay Beckett  1906 –1989 Irish author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Wrote in French and English, lived in Paris and was a member of the French Resistance during WW2.

CREDIT: Roger Pic/Wikimedia Commons

Arguably, Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, has come to be, in the
last few decades, somewhat overgrown with intellectual weeds, shrivelling it into some sort of dry, cerebral puzzle. The director of the new production at The Stables Theatre, David Glass – working with the artistic director of the Theatre Nation company, Patrick Kealey – is seeking to scrape away the overblown meta-theory and bring us Beckett’s play as it was meant to be: as a physical knockabout piece in giant clown shoes. As Glass said, he wants to “return it to its roots in vaudeville, silent movies and music hall verbal gymnastics.” To put it another way, the play, is first and foremost, a serious comedy, albeit a twisted one. 

Glass’s view seems to be that in the stupid pratfalls of the actors, something of the “comic idiocy” of “everything and everyone” is captured.  It is tempting to see a play about dark absurdity as highly relevant to our times, when the world appears to be led by brutal grotesques and self-obsessed clowns. And, in part, that may be true. The 1948 script is undoubtedly here a play for our times. 

But, Beckett was not trying to deliver a sermon on the awful state of the world; he was delving for laughter in the dark. And in this play I think we are going to find the sheer physical slapstick anarchy of Beckett’s hysterical vision let loose. Do turn up.

• The play runs from 7-11 June and tickets are available from The Stable Theatre website.

It is a long time since I’ve done anything creative with other people in a physical space. It’s even longer since I used drama to inspire my creativity, though it has always been a passion of mine. I was intrigued by Theatre Nation’s description of a Creative Practice workshop to reconnect you with your creativity post-lockdown and during this continuing pandemic. This workshop marks the beginning of Beckett Pandemic, a new three-year community project. 

Socially distanced circle

Samuel Beckett and his contemporaries created incredible work following the fallout of the second world war. The project sets out to explore the new stories we need to be writing now, in the light of this global pandemic. I signed up and was keen to see if I’d recognise some of the other participants, as most of them live in Hastings and St Leonards. 

So it was that I found myself describing a dream I’d had the night before joining the workshop, to a group of twenty strangers at The Stables Theatre. The synchronicities between my dream and the work the group had done the previous day were described by David, as the group sagely nodded. The dream was of giant false widow spiders, driving my car when I still haven’t got my licence, and getting away with it. David described how a web might represent networks, connections. The spider: fear of death, or change. The car and driver’s licence – journeying and learning, and the ‘getting away with it’ perhaps was a reference to the workshop, rules, structure, the outside world. All I can tell you is that the experience of sharing this dream, and other observations throughout the week and hearing other peoples’ had a profound effect on me, like the feeling that you get when you’ve left an art exhibition and the world looks different – more colourful, perhaps ‘sharper’ than it did before you went in.

The creative process was broken down by David, who has taught many incredible actors and performers, as well as guided corporates and institutions as wide ranging as the United Nations and Google to reconnect with their innate creativity to find strength and fresh perspectives in the work at hand. He told us stories of working with street gangs in New York, groups of villagers in Greece and elsewhere. In one of David’s exercises we were taken through guided meditations to imagine worlds where one of the three key elements to creative practice (yourself, other people or the world) is taken away. The images and sensations experienced by the group were interesting in their parallels and differences. Some imagined an ‘earthless’ world where the people became the buildings, eating one another in some form of renaissance depiction of hell. Others saw friends, family members, and felt great comfort in being close to other people. 

I can only speak for myself, when considering a world that carried on without me. The sensation was utterly galling, and incredibly saddening. And yet, all of these scenarios are imaginable – there will be a time without me in it; our earth is being killed by us; and people are continuing to populate, populate, populate. So, though these thought experiments were just a fiction, what you learn to then take out into the real world makes you feel more awake to the beauty and fragility of this life.

I left that particular session feeling a newfound love for the world, in all its fuckedupness. Despite COVID, despite Trump, despite terrible oppression and all that other awful stuff that plagues our minds daily in the form of news, noise, and extreme information overload.

In this little bubble of twenty people, at a workshop that is only permitted because strict social distancing is in place, we were beginning to set ourselves free of the pressures of the outside world, and at the same time freeing ourselves from our own internal prisons – that inner critic. I didn’t look at my phone for hours at a time – something I don’t think I’ve done since February this year. 

The things that this workshop gave me will continue to emerge, I’m sure, as the weeks and months of ‘these strange times’ roll on. If I could summarise for you, the message of this ‘alchemy’ that David and the team created within the four walls of the theatre would be: stay true to who you are, keep on creating, and remember the importance of telling our stories right now- both for yourself, and for those who aren’t able to. 

If any of this resonates, please get in touch with the folk at Theatre Nation. The workshop was the beginning of something very special: a new project that will involve the community of Hastings and St Leonards. A space in which we can co-create new stories, to tell the tales of our place, its people, and this strange, strange time we find ourselves in.

“Once again, at this extraordinary time of change, artists must lead and speak powerfully to and with the communities they serve. More than ever we need stories and art that transforms the realities of crisis into the moving metaphors of hope and perhaps dark celebration for both young and old. To this end, by celebrating the artists that walked out of the ashes of the Second World War, Beckett Pandemic seeks to inspire and find the new visions of this post-Covid world within the unique literal edginess of Hastings – and the community there.”

• Patrick Kealey, Artistic Director (Theatre Nation)
David Glass, Artistic Director (David Glass Ensemble)
www.theatrenation.org

Recent events have put a great strain on theatre providers worldwide. We at Hastings-based theatre company, Theatre Nation have been no exception but are adapting to the ever-changing external environment created by Covid-19. 

Following the cancellation of a mid-scale tour of Samuel Beckett’s existential classic Waiting for Godot (scheduled for April), the organisation began working out how to make viable theatre work on a pandemic-struck planet. In particular, how to rework and reimagine Beckett’s masterpiece in line with the times.

David Glass Workshop
PICTURE: Robert Golden

Enter David Glass. Accomplished theatre maker, visionary and avant-garde provocateur with an international reputation, David Glass agreed to take the reins and direct Waiting for Godot, now scheduled from 24th March – 3rd April 2021, at Stables Theatre. If Glass’ production is anything like his grotesquely comic, highly physical and powerfully emotive Bleak House (national tour 2019), it will be something special.

But the two companies feel that theatre is changing, and that it’s important to look beyond traditional theatre productions – not least because the threat to venues actually being operable remains ever-present. The support of Stables’ Chairman, Neil Sellman has been really invaluable in allowing the realisation of this work. 

So, we have decided to curate a three-year community-focused project on Samuel Beckett: Beckett in the Time of Pandemic. This will entail three productions: Waiting for Godot (2021), Endgame (2021) and a devised piece of new writing (2022). This piece will be inspired, conceived and created via
the programme of community workshops and events to be held with associate organisations – currently including Barefoot Opera and Eggtooth – as well as various individual artists. We’ll be announcing exciting future collaborations as time goes on. 

David Glass Workshop
PICTURE: Robert Golden

As part of Beckett in the Time of Pandemic, David Glass will be bringing his iconic ‘Alchemy Extraordinary’ Creative Practice workshop to the Stables Theatre in Hastings from 21st to 25th September. He will introduce his five-stage Creative Practice used by many worldwide; his work has influenced noted individuals and companies including Emma Thompson, Anne Marie Duff and Stephen Daldry. 

Theatre Nation’s key collaborator for their proposed Spring 2020 tour of Waiting for Godot was Leigh Dyer. His sculpture work is known and loved throughout Hastings (and beyond!), and he was commissioned to create the iconic tree. His beautiful sculpture deserves an audience, and so they’ve created a new project: Tree on Tour. The sculpture will be taken to various community spaces and be presented in various ways. For example, a singing tree featuring live performances from opera practitioners (with Barefoot Opera).

Not only that, but Caravan of Love – the first play I worte – will be performed at Sweet Venues from 5th – 11th October. It comes after a preview in Prague and small-scale UK tour (2018). It will be performed with appropriate social distancing and livestreaming, of course. 

It’s a challenging time for all of us, and Theatre Nation are hoping to remain optimistic, positive and creative in a time where the arts are more important than ever. That’s partly why we’re adding ‘Creativity, Community, Collaboration’ to their Manifesto – to reflect what they feel are the best ways to respond to Covid-19. 

• Read more on their website: www.theatrenation.org

Last week I met up with Tom Daldry and Patrick Kealey, founders of Theatre Nation, an innovative Hastings-based theatre company that works to keep young people engaged with the arts. Patrick acts as learning mentor and artistic director, and eloquently guided our meeting through its various topics. Tom meanwhile is the young and exciting writer/producer behind an increasing variety of new plays, one of which Polyamory? will be performed at the Pig’s Palace from 25-28th July. This and a solo performance from Patrick The Life and Rhymes of Archy and Mehitabel are showing as part of Hastings Fringe 2019. The pair hope to support young and disadvantaged people pursue their creative dreams, despite the frequently harsh economic realities in which inexperienced actors and writers often struggle. 

Theatre Nation was established in July 2017. Its website proudly proclaims “Theatre ought to be accessible, affordable and aspirational. People shouldn’t have to travel to see professional-quality theatre: it should be on our doorstep. Thus Theatre Nation was born…Hastings is rife with exceptional artistic talent, and we want to work with a wealth of artistic disciplines. We want to harness this talent into exceptional theatre productions: creating new work and adapting classic pieces alike.” 

Its successes include a musical drama Paris Snow that premiered at the Kino-Teatr St Leonards in 2017, a minimalist production of Hamlet and Tom’s debut play Caravan of Love. The company’s take on Shakespeare’s classic was particularly noteworthy as it featured a female Hamlet and was performed equally well in the cavernous space of St Mary-in-the-Castle and the close quarters at the top of Printers Playhouse in Eastbourne (no members of the Printers’ audience were harmed in their fully choreographed fencing scenes). 

Caravan of Love toured in Eastbourne, at Prague Fringe Festival and at Barnstaple Fringe Festival in May/June 2018. One reviewer described Tom’s writing as the “love-child of Beckett, Pinter and Orton”. Patrick explained to me that the piece was conceived on a kind of writer’s retreat he set up for Tom in a caravan in Ireland, the idea for which came as Patrick looked for ways to support his young friend’s previously repressed dreams of becoming a playwright. 

Tom’s next offering Polyamory? examines the unusual relationships and allocations of power between three residents of a ‘House of Games’. The house is owned by the eldest of the three, who uses their desire for shelter and home to keep them bound to the place and its schedule of entertainments. Patrick described to me the way Tom’s characters use language as a weapon, and explained how interesting and rewarding, but also how challenging the work could be for actors, who have to be able to express a character’s true feelings through the subtlety of an opposing emotional artifice… like an iceberg whose depth is invisible but still obviously present.   

Archie and Mehitabel on the other hand is Patrick’s party piece – a much loved and well-rehearsed solo act that he’s played many times, in many places. The central characters are Archie, a poet reincarnated into a cockroach, and Mehitabel, a sultry alley cat who proclaims “I was cleopatra once”. Both were invented by Don Marquis, a 1920s New York satirist, and have been adapted from free verse by Theatre nation to fit the format of a one-man performance. Despite the age of Marquis’ writing, the satire has powerful environmental themes, with characters imagining a world in which humans will ultimately be replaced by much more efficient insect dominions. 

• You can find some of Tom’s words on Hamlet and Caravan of Love on our website. Archy and Mehitabel will be playing at St Leonard’s Pub, London Road on 21st July, 3pm, 22nd and 23rd July, 7.30pm. Polyamory? Will be at the Pig’s Palace, White Rock on 26th July, 9pm, 27th and 28th July 7.30pm. Also at the Printers Playhouse, Eastbourne, 2nd and 3rd August, 7.45pm. Tickets are £10 or £8 concessions. Book through theatrenation.org