Production Reviews 105

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1 Production Reviews 105 have seemed a risky choice, particularly during a recession. Yet, the heavy explanatory apparatus created the impression that the Steppenwolf doubted its subscribers willingness to engage with challenging works. Stefka Mihaylova DOI: /jobs Happy Days (new Greek translation by Dionyssis Kapsalis), Chora Theatre, Athens, 1 October 8 November Director: Hector Lygizos; Winnie: Mina Adamaki; Willie: Erricos Litsis; costume/set design: Mayou Trikerioti; lighting: Dimitris Kassimatis. Within this ash grey : Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Endgame, municipal Market of Kypseli, Athens, June Director: Elena Vogli; costume/set design: Maria Karathanou; lighting: Michalis Bouris; technical assistance/pianist: Pantelis Panteloglou; interpretation by students of Modern Times School of Dramatic Art. Although based on a faithful new Greek translation of Happy Days (rather than Oh les beaux jours), the performance of the play by Lygizos and his actors foregrounded its metaphysical elements and experimental language, and projected this into a specifically Greek setting. This idea was only successful during Winnie s pauses or when the couple danced together, putting into practice Human nature. Human weakness. Natural weakness (Complete Dramatic Works, ), which was otherwise absent from the performance. In order to draw Winnie s two cries for help closer together, one third of the original text was cut. It demanded some serious ingenuity on the part of the audience to follow Lygizos thinking, which was to ask the public what Beckett asks of Winnie: to participate in an experiment. As if recovering from surgery (who knows if Winnie was not receiving sand therapy buried in her hill), Mina Adamaki seemed to act in the first part as Beckett would have her act in the second, and vice versa. That is to say, she was meaningful and resolute in the beginning, alternating enthusiasm and depression,

2 106 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Figure 1. Photo by Anastasia Deligianni. Figure 2. Photo by Anastasia Deligianni. and then she remained vigilant, almost maniacal, from the moment of waking in the second act. Her famous umbrella didn t ignite at a short distance above her head but was brutally broken and thrown away by the actress. Tied to a chair in the two acts rather than buried in a mound, a technician finally releases her as she moves from the television screen to the front of the stage, finally liberated. Innovation or licence? Neither. Winnie and the ever decreasing nothingness go on in real life, which is where they come from anyway. This postmodern Winnie addressed herself to the technician who saved her as if he was Willie. Like an actor who herself asked the writer to make her testify, to give her a chance to prove her talent, she makes up her stories, without the redemption of heavenly hopes of youth or that hell of technology, as Winnie s life is narrated within a TV setting. This

3 Production Reviews 107 horrific realization is what reversed the mood in the two acts and was brilliantly portrayed by Adamaki s Winnie; in this she was comparable to American Winnies, who lack the poignant hysteria of their English counterparts and the existential decadence of their French colleagues, but win (!) in simplicity and realism instead. On the other hand, Willie was too visible and active in the first act. He distracted the attention of spectators expecting to concentrate on Winnie. In the second act, he was sitting abandoned, among the audience, completely absent from the stage. And then, we almost missed him, because the role was so well-played by Erricos Litsis, who built on the old Willie, highlighting and deepening him, making of him a personified hog, like Odysseus s companions chez Circe or Orwell s pigs. In an intratextual game of echoes, mirrorings and parallelisms from one Beckett play to another, Lygizos redefined the central focus of his show every evening and recomposed Beckett s original pieces rather than trying to stage the decomposition attempted by Beckett himself. Thus, the use of a giant screen next to the television box where the action unfolds to focus on the face of Winnie brought Not I to mind; the transmission of Winnie s voice as if it were recorded evoked the Voice in Eh Joe and all the Voices that haunt Beckett s characters; the technicians getting involved in the end, like Le Spectateur in Eleuthéria and the Boy in Waiting for Godot; and the watching and mounting of the plot via many different monitors, playing the dark role of a third party observer which both excited and puzzled Beckett; so the couple Winnie- Willie is being dressed in the clothes of other Beckettian couples, an element which was perceived in a surprising emotional way by the Athenian public. This is why Willie s role evolves, as we mentioned, although he still lags behind Winnie s delight in self-exposure, in order to rebalance the relationship, so that their relationship also refers to Hamm and Clov, and to that vain conflict of power between alternating and interdependent, disabled authoritarianism and inevitable enslavement; it is a comment on the modern Greek family, and indicative of Hector Lygizos directing brand. The media of television, in which Lygizos wanted and managed to set Happy Days, is an ambiguous place. In many ways it resembles the human head, which has also served as a metaphor

4 108 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES used by some critics in either interpreting 1 or directing 2 Beckett s plays, or the squares of old times, which encompass commercial galleries, or an ancient forum. The confluence of these three sites (head, forum, television) provides us with three examples of a wellknown coexistence and conflict, a game in Beckett s work which justifies such productions based upon specific spaces: that of the interior and the exterior, the private and the public, the self and the other. Thus Beckett s early poems are both closed like oysters and clear as mirrors, Belacqua wavers between his estranged psyche and the strange social requirements around him, the fictional heroes (Murphy, Molloy/Moran and Watt) are presented as messengers, wandering about, but without any substantial or constitutional doctrine to preach, and the plays contain all of these contradictory dipoles together with a tribune (stage, screen, radio transmitter) from where (by dramatical definition) the characters invite others to view and/or hear these contradictions. Despite this ambiguity and thanks to it, these three sites give at least an answer to the where question: at the crossroad, at the boundary, at the circumference where, simultaneously, the centre is bustling. Such a site was also used in Elena Vogli s production, which encompassed the three plays Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Endgame. Particular scenes of each play were chosen and performed, mixed up in order. However, this did not seem to be an obstacle (Did Beckett ever follow Aristotle s definition of the progress of the plot? Didn t he repeat the same word patterns within a text and between texts, like an echo?). Vogli s invention was to connect the excerpts, creating a rather male role who walked like Clov, looked like an imbecile and gazed suspiciously (like Mr. Endon?), mumbled phrases from The Unnamable and guided the audience to specific locations on the stage from one episode to the next with a torch. The role, however, was played by a female actor (as was Hamm). The two female actors appearing in these two roles also played two of the five Winnies that appeared during the show (or rather two out of five times that Winnie appeared). None of these deviations in the performance of the plays seemed to have any subversive importance or aesthetic objective, and the audience hardly took notice of them (concerning the sex of his characters, Beckett was of course adamant in his directions, but what would

5 Production Reviews 109 he have said about this androgynous, almost sexless universe, that Vogli and her colleagues created?). This was because the essence of the project was located elsewhere. Imagine a very large garage or stable with high ceilings, with a sloping roof, a door opening upwards like a rising curtain giving way to a square with kids, elders, cafés and kiosks (the entrance). Imagine that the inside is like a public road (in its centre an opened parachute with cords fastened to the ground and bound to something like a suitcase-bulb forming the tree of Waiting for Godot, its cloth white like winter but abundant like summer, therefore of indeterminate season). Imagine boutiques on the sidewalks, some with lowered shutters, some fronted with debris, some with amorphous piles that would later become Winnie s mound, one serving as a dressing room for the actors to visibly get prepared (as the audience waited for the show to start), the other as a café, open to receive the public as when the market was operating. Imagine the wheelchair of Endgame next to a piano, tilted between street and sidewalk, in front of a former cold room (it probably was once the butchers of the market), which then hosted Hamm s old parents. And finally imagine the other door at the opposite end of the gallery, in some distance, which remained closed until the end, when it opened and offered the actors an exit to the little back road with the yellow lights of the neighbourhood, among parked cars and clueless pedestrians. Imagine, in a few words, a bazaar in miniature. Add now the (five) Winnies, advertising their wares as if they were on a market attracting clients, their products always the same, fresh each day. Add Vladimir and Estragon simply playing, chattering like children whom their parents, too busy shopping, left there and who, not knowing what to do but increasingly finding something, resemble those gamins de Paris with short trousers, those fake young gentlemen knocking about busy streets and waiting for a penny to fall from the sky on the pavement. Finally, add the family quartet of Endgame, static and feisty, like difficult customers who do not know what they want, who curse each other because they do not find in this market the cheese or the fish they used to find once, but do not, cannot abandon the habit to return either. They themselves become food for commentary.

6 110 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Hence, what Modern Times theatre group read into Beckett is what we face every time is there before we get there, and will be there after we are gone. The reason why we turn now to one thing and then to another is due to accident, or to practical necessity. The event happens or does not happen, and this occurs independent of us. We only get involved when we decide to pay attention to it, and when we associate such events with other events, or in this case, texts with other texts. Thus we do not lose anything from a day that we had not planned and we win all that is there to be conquered if we decide to give sense or to interpret it. If you try to get parallel activities together within a confined space, you either go mad or you feel obliged to stay still. The same happens with language, science and art. We need pieces or details to deal with and an outer cover of the chaos if we are to continue to shape its inner part. If so, head, forum and TV become containers of the infinite. What a grandiose opportunity for us everyday people. Of course, all this is valid only as far as the possibility of observation and judgment of the solution or of the magical display the infinite going on within confined settings is achieved and maintained. This last condition is what Beckett achieved, and both Lygizos and Vogli staged. Anastasia Deligianni DOI: /jobs NOTES 1. Enoch Brater, Beyond minimalism: Beckett s late style in the theater, pp. 39 and 84, Oxford UP, In September 1997, Frederick Neumann performed Company with the group Mabou Mines and the key artistic involvement of Sabrina Hamilton from the Williams Theatre Department, with paintings reminiscent of human skulls and lights referring to insight.