You’re creating a contemporary play with 5 inmates of the Le Pontet penitentiary centre. It’s a form of writing that deals with the human condition, with existence and its vacuity, different from the classic plays you’ve worked on before. How did those themes find meaning in prison?
Classic or modern, these texts are part of the great library of theatre. The public knows them, even if from afar. After meeting with the great authors who laid the foundations of our discipline, I wanted to explore those who transformed it. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is part of this collective baggage. To work on Waiting for Godot with detained actors is not insignificant. No theatre is insignificant with them. The major themes in Godot—the wait (a forced wait, one could say), the impossibility of leaving, the repetition of the language, gestures, and action, the other, the laughter… Right from our first readings, they were able to find a way into this monument of contemporary theatre. There was a meeting of minds, maybe for all those reasons, but probably also for others. In any case, I did not choose this play as a reference to their situation as inmates. It speaks for itself, it’s present enough. With them, I’m there to make theatre, not to show that I am making inmates perform on stage. Moreover, this isn’t the show that reminds them of their condition the most, unlike the tragedies, with their notions of crime and guilt. Anyway, during our workshops, the actors do not necessarily make connections between the texts and their personal trajectories. We started the work by reading excerpts from Jean-Paul Sartre on existentialism, but also Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche. We sought to contextualise the text within the great metaphysical questions that marked the 1950s. This link with philosophy is what interests me about Samuel Beckett.
The only true action of the play is waiting and, from the point of view of dramatic construction, repetition. How did you approach this text which looks like a novel from which comments would have been removed?
Waiting for Godot is not a play of stagnation, it moves—in circles and on its axis maybe, but it moves, it evolves. Godot is a revolution, in more ways than one. It is indeed a novelistic play insofar as the story isn’t told from the point of view of a single character, like in Antigone or Oedipus Rex. Here, Samuel Beckett composed a score based on the trajectories of the four main characters. That score forced us to work together, as an ensemble. With the classics, actors have to face those great monologues alone. It’s pretty convenient for us, because the actors can’t meet outside of rehearsals. Here, the text is made of lines that sometimes follow each other very quickly. It’s almost impossible to work on it alone. It’s the text that held the group together.
Which seems paradoxical because, in the play, the characters struggle to communicate, they can’t seem to ever get into a flow in terms of dialogue…
That’s what I liked about it! In the classics, a character enters and explains what’s happening. The exposition scene tells you the plot. Actors and spectators know how to position themselves in relation to the text. That’s not the case with this text, which talks about the difficulty of making contact with others. About the difficulty of human relationships. Let’s not forget that it was written after World War II, when the trauma of the Holocaust was still very fresh.
Human relationships are broken, and so are bodies. The characters are all damaged, they’re crawling around or falling over… It’s a very physical play, always on the edge between comedy and tragedy. How did you approach this particular dimension?
That was one of our major challenges this year. With tragedy, you have to stand straight, work on your posture, take small steps… For this play, on the contrary, I worked based on their bodies. Muscular bodies, sometimes hunched over. Bodies always in motion, used to walking around in circles in the prison yard. Bodies marked by incarceration, just as the characters are marked by their wanderings. It’s a very physical performance, which alternates between clownish or lyrical scenes, and others that are more natural, quotidian, or tragic.
The play is made up of countless variations on a theme, each measure counted, each silence marked. How much freedom does the text leave the actors?
One of the major themes of the play is that everything is interchangeable. Act 1 and Act 2, the situations, even lines… It’s a recurring motif which creates a strange sensation: we feel like something is moving forward, but we don’t know what, because the characters are stuck in place. We know time passes but without understanding how. Every silence is indeed counted. The actors were fascinated by those silences, those gaps left by the author. It allowed us to give them very diverse interpretations that were never fixed. To give spectators the opportunity to make their own interpretation, especially multiple interpretations, requires a lot of precision from an actor.
A road, a rock, a tree: the setting imagined by Samuel Beckett is minimalist indeed. What will yours look like?
It will be the same! There’s only one difference: the configuration. Contrary to the author’s instructions, we’re using a central staging setting. This allowed me to include the audience in the characters’ movements and to follow each of the actors more freely. Ultimately, there are four different perspectives in the play and, thanks to this setup, we will also see them from four different viewpoints! It greatly helped free up the actors, who can speak from anywhere and easily play with the reference points of the road, the rock, and the tree.
You’re presenting a shortened version. How did you decide what cuts to make?
By thinking about the text as a whole rather than in each of its parts. The numerous repetitions, variations, and other self-references that compose it made finding things to cut extremely complicated! But there are still traces of it in the actors’ performance. The words we cut have been replaced by gestures, intonations, movements that sometimes come back, like a feeling of déjà vu.
This play shows us outcasts in all their complexity. Outcasts who can’t leave, who can’t break away from each other. What does it inspire you?
I think Samuel Beckett went beyond the figure of the monster in theatre! He sought to show man, the complexity of human relationships, including in their inability to break away from each other. There’s love between those characters. Brotherly love. It’s important, because this love—which is very real—stands against the codes of the absurd, which is an abstract vision of the world.
Interview conducted by Francis Cossu and translated into English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach