Waiting even longer for Godot
An attempt to stage Waiting for Godot in the Netherlands took on a Beckettian turn when the venue cancelled the performances because the Irish director had auditioned only men for the all-male cast of characters.
Can you imagine?? Auditioning only men to play men??? That director should be in jail, with bruises and contusions.
The play, in which Vladimir and Estragon are occasionally joined by other male characters as they await someone who never arrives, had been in rehearsals since November and was due to be staged at the University of Groningen’s Usva student cultural centre in March.
But the performances were cancelled after the venue discovered the casting call for the play’s five male roles had been open to men only, something they informed the production team went against a university inclusivity policy.
The university has a policy that forbids auditioning according to the sex of the characters?
“If it concerned a play with five white guys that they’d held open auditions for, everything would have been fine. But you can’t ban people right from the start,” Usva theatre programmer Bram Douwes told the Ukrant newspaper.
Yes you can. You can save everybody’s time and trouble by listing some criteria.
“[Beckett] explicitly stated that this play should be performed by five men. Moving forward, times have changed. And that the idea that only men are suitable for this role is outdated and even discriminatory,” university press officer Elies Kouwenhoven said.
That’s the play that Beckett wrote though. It’s too late to fix his thinking, and it’s not “discriminatory” to cast his play the way he wrote it.
“We as a university stand for an open inclusive community where it is not appropriate to exclude others, on any basis.”
Oh fuck off. So students can walk into their professors’ houses without knocking? Toilets have no walls? The public gets to sit in on all lectures and classes? The cafeteria feeds everyone in Groningen?
Of course it’s “appropriate” to exclude others in some circumstances. It’s also necessary. You don’t have to invite people you dislike to your parties. You don’t have to hire the first person who applies when you have a job that needs filling. You don’t have to read the first book you see at the library.
Mr Moyne told The Irish Times he had considered casting people of other genders for the roles, but could not do so because of rules set down by the playwright before his death and upheld by the Beckett estate.
Beckett sued a Dutch theatre company in 1988 for choosing to cast women in the play, the best known work from the Theatre of the Absurd movement. His estate holds the rights to the work until 2059, and has continued to oppose productions that deviate from Beckett’s instructions.
So the People of Incloosion will have to leave Beckett alone for 36 years. Fortunately there are other plays.
Oh, wonderful! Can we apply the principle to the opera, too? I’d like to see Pavarotti performing the role of Juliet, please! Why on earth can he not? Indeed, why can’t I? Never mind that I am a 69 year old male and can’t sing. So denying me a chance to perform as Juliet is both (reverse) sexism, ageism, and ableism – three deadly sins rolled into one!
As an aside,
They can, in Norway. Lectures at the university are open to the public, by law. With a few exceptions, such as in medical school if they discuss case histories, especially if the patient is present. Not that I have ever seen masses of non-students showing up for my own lectures on functional analysis og PDEs, though. Funny, that.
But Estragon sounds like estrogen, which is what makes you a woman. (Of course, men have no estrogen in their bodies; and if your inject estrogen into a man, he instantly turns into a woman. Everyone knows that.) So Estragon should definitely be played by a woman!
Why on earth can he not?
Quite apart from the fact that he died in 2007, of course. But his performance as Juliet could still be managed by digital means, I am sure.
It reminds me of the ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Also of the words of a sarcastic reviewer by the name of George Bernard Shaw, re the actor (not actress) Beerbohm Tree, of whom Shaw wrote to the effect that “the best way for Tree to succeed in comedy would be either to be born again, or to play Juliet.”
All it does is show how little insight these clowns in charge here have into themselves: which is what arguably the theatre and playwrights are mainly concerned with in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Beerbohm_Tree
That’s a fascinating thing to know about Norway. Very good, now I think about it – I should have said just classes, because lectures can (at least theoretically) be open to all with no harm done.
I did see a female only production of Godot in Lincoln. I’m not sure how they got away with it, since a friend of mine here in Hastings (a much smaller community with a theatre no one much knows is there) had to deal with the Beckett estate when she dyed a gown for “Come and Go” the wrong shade of red. She asked me “Have you ever tried to re-dye velvet?” Fortunately, no.
I have a play I wrote no one will even give a reading to because the name is “Middle Aged White Women”. All the characters are white. The play is making a point about the dynamics of middle-aged white women, but no one will even read it, let alone stage a reading with actors.
I am really amazed that they’ve done this with a play featuring men. I would have expected a play featuring only women to be targeted for this, with TiMs being used instead of women. (I know, there probably aren’t a lot of plays with exclusively female characters, and probably none where the author had the sort of stipulation that Beckett made a condition of performance.)
I bet Beckett doesn’t even mention gender, but refers to sex only. This fiasco could have been avoided by casting some TiMs. Different “gender” but the correct sex. Cowards.
Many years ago in Maine, I saw a production of “Twelfth Night” in which all the male roles were played by women. It completely destroyed the effect of the play–in the original Viola (Cesario) played by a young man pretending to be a woman has so many homoerotic overtones, but all that was O B L I T E R A T E D by the trendy, trendy casting.
Afterward during the ovation, everyone stood around so smugly. “Look how edgy we are!”
That’s so absurd. Twelfth Night is ALREADY all about gender-bending, there’s no need to try to make it more so.
I’m okay with theatre productions playing with the source material. I’m okay with them playing it straight. Both can exist, and it certainly is not discriminatory to cast characters within certain criteria such as sex. If a casting director is looking for a man for a role, pretending the role is actually open to any applicant would be a disservice to those women who spend their time and their hope auditioning for it, not knowing their efforts are – secretly – guaranteed to fail. It also wastes the time of the casting people, sitting through the applicants they know do not have a chance.
It also bothers me that a playwright (or estate) has legal powers to demand the production only play the work straight. The playwright could certainly criticise a production for the choices made which deviate from the original vision – and some choices really are poorly conceived, undermining an important theme or creating plot holes or whatever – but actually having veto power? That feels strange.
To me too. I don’t think playwrights generally do that.
I believe Edward Albee gave binding instructions on the casting of, for instance, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, which have been enforced by his estate.
I did once see an all-woman production of ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, here in Tokyo, and that worked very well, bringing out the complacent misogyny of the two ‘gentlemen’ – as, I think, Shakespeare intended it should be brought out: the end is shocking. And I also saw Kathryn Hunter playing the part of ‘Lear’ – once in Tokyo & once in London; the director was Helena Kaut-Howson, and the production was a tribute to her mother, a very tough Polish-Jewish woman who saved her daughters under the Nazi occupation of Poland by smuggling them from place to place and grew increasingly demanding in age. It was in most respects very good indeed. But the only ‘Lear’ I like almost unreservedly is Kozintsev’s great film – along with the BBC radio production with Sir Donald Wolfit.
My favorite Lear is the audio version with Paul Scofield & Cyril Cusack & Robert Stephens & a bunch of other geniuses.
There was a brilliantly comedic “gender-switching” production of “Macbeth” in Seattle many years ago. It was very well acted by what was, I believe, a nearly full gay and lesbian cast. The three witches were drag queens, who came on stage to Cher’s “Dark Lady”, but delivered their lines like *actors*. The primary characters – Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, etc. – were played seriously, not camp, but camp was incorporated quite cleverly. I doubt such a production would be allowed these days.
Only slightly related, but there was a delightful 1987 comedy adventure film, starring Shelley Long and Bette Midler, titled Outrageous Fortune. Shelley Long’s character had a dream to star in Hamlet. As Ophelia? No, as Hamlet. In the end, she fulfilled her dream (with Bette Midler’s character as Ophelia).
It isn’t unusual for playwrights to do that. And I actually don’t blame them. Directors are notoriously bad at following the author’s script, instead doing all kinds of crap that doesn’t improve it. I can think of only one play in which the changes the director made led to an improvement, not to a monstrosity. Directors have enormous egos, and don’t think playwrights can write. They are the only ones who can write, the only ones who can act, the only ones who understand lighting, set design, costuming, the like. Play rehearsals are often a little dictatorship.
I have had the good luck to work with directors who work with me. I have had the bad luck to have directors who ruined a play, changing the meaning by altering characters and words, EVEN AFTER I REJECTED THE CHANGES – which, by the way, isn’t legal. Most playwrights won’t challenge it, because we want to continue getting our work produced.
I think trying to retain the integrity of your script, even in one small way, against the onslaught of directors’ ‘visions’ is quite understandable. And Godot can work with women…I don’t even think it changes the meaning. But I am one who believes if Beckett wanted it that way, he wrote the goddamned play. It’s his creative work that went into what is in truth a work of genius.
Sorry for my rant; just needed to get it off my chest. Thanks for listening. I’ll bow out.
iknklast #17
That sounds very much like the situation with movie adaptions of books. Ok, I get it, sticking slavishly to the text is not always going to work very well in a movie setting. Different mediums working in different ways and all that…
On the whole, though, movie directors can’t seem to resist changing things around for the sake of changing things around – even when sticking to the text would have made better sense – because they want the finished product to be “their own” work rather than just their “translation” into movie form of the author’s work.
Bjarte, I have heard directors say “writers can’t write” and explaining that it required a director to rewrite into something worthwhile. They have also said “actors can’t act”, and they have to do something to the actor to turn them into something worthwhile.
I would turn it around. “Directors can’t write. Directors can’t act. That’s why they are directors, and not writers or actors.” With that being said, I have known people who have filled two or more of these roles successfully; that still doesn’t mean they can rewrite another person’s writing and make it better.
I have often had my work misunderstood because when I write about smaller city life, it doesn’t make sense to the bigger city theatre companies, who think “people don’t act like that”. Most of them live in a bubble populated only by other theatre people, and don’t have any idea how people behave. In spite of that, they think they understand better than anyone else.
Yeah, directors want it to be their ‘own work’, not a collaborative work. They hate to give credit to others for the work the others did.
I have even seen a number of theatres starting to leave the author name off the playbill. I’m not sure that’s legal, at least not for work that isn’t in the public domain.