In April 2020, when China was gingerly reopening, after months of being locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic, Chinese theatre artists mounted a production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). It was a self-consciously experimental, boundary-pushing production: the cast and crew, all sheltering in their homes in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan (the first epicentre of the pandemic) and elsewhere, were performing online, on the virtual stage for the hundreds of thousands of ‘theatre-goers’ to see through live streaming.Footnote 2 It was an audacious experiment keenly aware of its potential sociocultural and artistic significance, a historicized version of Beckett's play, a philosophical (and religious) allegory, that attempted to speak to the human condition at this particular time and place.
Of the many important Western playwrights that Chinese theatre artists have tried to stage,Footnote 3 Samuel Beckett (1906–89) has proved to be an elusive and multifaceted challenge. In China's long tradition of theatre, people typically go to theatre houses to be entertained, although that does not mean that drama has not been used for sociopolitical purposes. Plays by Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), such as A Doll's House, were introduced to the Chinese in the early decades of the twentieth century to awaken people's consciousness and rally them for women's liberation and for cultural and national renewal.Footnote 4 In 1979, barely a few years after the curtain of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) had fallen, Chinese theatre artists staged The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), a German playwright who had drawn inspiration from classical Chinese philosophy and traditional theatre (xiqu), to meet ‘the sociopolitical and psychological needs of a nation still nursing its wounded psyche’.Footnote 5 At first glance, there seems very little that Beckett's Waiting for Godot has to offer, given the sphinx-like, inscrutable story it tries to tell, by way of entertaining and/or enlightening Chinese theatre-goers.
Although it was not until 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, that the first Chinese translation of Waiting for Godot was issued internally as a reference book especially for theatre professionals,Footnote 6 Chinese theatre artists have been fascinated with the play, especially since the 1980s when China reopened its doors to the outside world and Western art and literature came rushing (back) in tidal waves. Feeling that precious time had been lost and feeling the urgency of cultural and national renewal, Chinese theatre artists did not sit down and pore over every word and punctuation mark of Waiting for Godot (or rather, whatever Chinese translation of the play was available at the time), through lenses such as Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, archetypal, Christian and so on (which, also freshly introduced, were not readily accessible anyway) to puzzle out the dramatic world envisioned by Beckett. Instead of waiting for all the stars to be perfectly aligned, they put Waiting for Godot on the Chinese stage, searching for ways in which the play might speak to a local audience. From the ‘real’ stage performance in the early 1990s to the ‘virtual’ stage performance live-streamed in April 2020 (against the backdrop of a ravaging pandemic), Chinese theatre artists have persisted, in the Beckettian spirit of ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’,Footnote 7 in their efforts to stage the Beckettian play for the sociocultural, artistic and existential needs of the country and people.
Waiting for Godot and the Chinese stage: a timeless mismatch?
There is perhaps a myriad of ways to approach Waiting for Godot and to try to understand its profound complexity. We can see it from the influence of Western philosophy, such as Schopenhauer, especially his concept of the Will, ‘a blind, irrational cosmic striving, an impetuous universal impulse, defying intelligence and rational analysis’.Footnote 8 It lies in our deep, primal ‘fear of an inability to control the forces’, Tatlow posits, ‘guided by a perceived and immediate but limited self-interest, that now operate through us and may well lead to our destruction’.Footnote 9 We can try to see the play through the lens of religion, e.g. Buddhism, to interpret it as an expression of deep spiritual anguish over the ‘absurdity’ of the human condition. As Angela Moorjani shows in her recent book Beckett and Buddhism, there are ample Buddhist resonances in Beckett's writings, although Beckett himself denies explicit Buddhist influence on him.Footnote 10 We can also try to approach the Beckettian play through ‘Heidegger's conception of nothingness and its importance to the existence and experience of being itself’,Footnote 11 or through Hindu philosophy, which, among other things, sees ‘waiting’ as ‘the unity of existence, the inspiration to reorient the undertow of moral slackness and other entropic forces’.Footnote 12
One daunting challenge for Chinese theatre artists when trying to stage Waiting for Godot is that Chinese xiqu (traditional Chinese drama/theatre), through its long history of development, typically features a main storyline that has a clear dramatic arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution) that can be easily followed by Chinese theatre-goers, and has an unambiguous morality (whereby virtue is rewarded and vice punished). Characters interact with each other and speak (or sing) to clearly express themselves as the story develops toward the denouement. In Chinese xiqu history, the famous theorist Wang Jide (1540–1623) considered the arrangement of the plot as of primary importance for xiqu creation.Footnote 13 Li Yu (1611–80), a classical Chinese playwright and theorist, emphasized the paramount importance of plot and structure in dramatic creation,Footnote 14 which is very similar to the importance of plot and structure outlined in Aristotle's Poetics. One can argue that Waiting for Godot actually has a dramatic arc that enacts inaction. However, such an arc is not readily discernible to many theatre-goers in the West, let alone to Chinese theatre-goers steeped in and moulded by a very different drama/theatre tradition. ‘In the persistent absence of any answers, explanations, or even discernible plot’, as Mark and Juliette Taylor-Batty thus describe the experience of many theatre-goers, ‘we clutch at the apparently pointless comic routines and idle banter as our entertainment, just as the characters employ them to pass the time’.Footnote 15
Similarly, another characteristic of Chinese xiqu, its use of the virtual structure of time and space on the stage, seems incongruous with the sense of time embodied and experienced in a play like Waiting for Godot. Time and space in Chinese xiqu are fluid, transcendent and psychological rather than real and physical, flowing with the development of plot and the feelings of the characters (as embodied and enacted by the actors).Footnote 16 For example, in Lin Chong Escapes at Night (Lin Chong Ye Ben),Footnote 17 a sixteenth-century Chinese play based on the fourteenth-century classical novel Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan, also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh),Footnote 18 the titular character (one of the best-known 108 outlaw heroes rebelling against the Song Dynasty), who was framed and exiled, escapes from his jailors one snowy night and flees to Mount Liang to join the other outlaws there. In the play, Lin sings arias and runs all night, time passing indicated by the actor's movement on the stage, stylized and symbolic (accompanied by percussion and other Chinese musical instruments). No other indication is necessary for Chinese theatre-goers. The more modern Chinese xiju, which arguably began in the first decade of the twentieth century with the introduction and adaptation of Western-style drama, is more in the realistic mode, as exemplified by Ibsen and theorized by Stanislavsky.Footnote 19 Plays in the realistic mode, whether modern Chinese xiju or those adapted from the West, tend to have clear dramatic arcs (propelled by tensions, conflicts and/or character development), which can engage theatre-goers and hold their attention as the dramatic action takes them on a journey from beginning through rising action to climax and resolution in the short span of two hours or so of performance time. Owing to its absence of a readily ‘discernible plot’, the passing of time in Waiting for Godot, which is real, physical time, can feel dreadfully slow for Chinese audiences. This, ‘aggravated’ by the fact that characters seem to crosstalk ‘nonsensically’ (e.g. the biblical allusions permeating the play would elude most Chinese audiences unfamiliar with the Christian BibleFootnote 20), would present quite a challenge to the Chinese theatre artists and theatre-goers alike.
As a philosophical allegory, Waiting for Godot presents a deep probe into the human condition, revealing as it does the evanescence, emptiness, loneliness and hopelessness of the state of survival in reality. The irony is that despite, or rather because of, the profound allegorical nature of the play, Waiting for Godot has attracted theatre artists from around the world, providing them both challenges and opportunities when trying to stage it for artistic, cultural and/or sociopolitical purposes.Footnote 21 Indeed, the play can have tremendous potential to be staged for sociopolitical purposes, as theatre artists have done in Budapest (1965), Sarajevo (1993), New Orleans (2007), Zuccotti Park, New York (2011) and elsewhere.Footnote 22 Like theatre artists elsewhere in the world, especially those from cultures outside the West, coming from very different philosophical, religious and artistic (dramatic/theatrical) traditions and practices, e.g. Indian, Korean and Brazilian,Footnote 23 Chinese theatre artists have persisted in taking on the Beckettian play and putting their own interpretations on the stage so it would speak meaningfully to their own audiences as China continues to undergo profound socio-economic and cultural changes.
More ‘action’ to enact ‘inaction’: trying again and failing better?
One of the first notable Beckett productions in China did not have an auspicious start.Footnote 24 Originally scheduled for 31 December 1989, as part of Meng Jinghui's master's degree programme requirements at the Central Drama Academy in Beijing,Footnote 25 it was intended for an open-air performance, by the side of a big coal pile on the campus – coal being the primary source for heating and cooking during those days. By this time, China had been reopened to the outside world for more than ten years. Plays from Western modernist and postmodernist writers, including the so-called theatre of the absurd (Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, among others), had seen systematic (re)introductions, mostly through translations, and had already produced a transformative impact on the Chinese drama/theatre scene.Footnote 26 Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for example, had inspired the writing and staging of The Bus Stop (Chezhan, 1983), a play that features ‘waiting’ as both ‘form and motif’ by the future Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian.Footnote 27
But 1989 turned out to be an eventful year, to say the least, and the performance was shut down at the last minute, as all such public events that would involve large gatherings of people were not permitted at the time.Footnote 28 Meng Jinghui had originally planned an open-air performance next to a huge pile of coal (used for winter heating) on the college campus. He was reprimanded by the college authorities before they shut down the performance.Footnote 29
By way of coping with the inevitable feeling of disappointment and the absurdity of it all, perhaps, the cast of young student actors sat out in the open and read through the script. But they did not give up and tried again in 1991. For Meng, who has since become one of the best-known experimental theatre artists in China, staging Waiting for Godot and such plays was his way of reconfirming his belief ‘in our existence’ and his determination that
we shall never try to find any excuse for falling prey to the temptations of servitude, that we shall never become an ornament in the scenery of falsehood and affectations, that we shall never let our body and soul suffer the plight of weakening as we run for life.Footnote 30
This 1991 production was mounted on the stage of a small warehouse-like auditorium at the academy, brightly lit, with bare walls, repressively confined despite the tall windows on both sides.Footnote 31 In the upstage right corner sits a black grand piano, as if to help anchor this heavy, yet empty, place, although it is never played even once during the entire performance. Diagonally from this grand piano, downstage left, sits an upturned bicycle (the ubiquitous, iconic, all-purpose, all-terrain means of transport in China back then), next to a small stone bench. This bicycle will prove a useful prop throughout the performance, especially during Act II, when in a moment of panic and despair Estragon jumps on the bicycle and rides it around the stage in a vain attempt to break free from an invisible chain or bond. Opposite the upturned bicycle, downstage right, sits a much bigger stone bench, the size of a brick in the ancient city walls of China. On this stone bench Lucky will be delivering his only speech and perhaps one of the most important speeches in the play (a two-page-long unpunctuated ‘stream of consciousness’, considerably abbreviated in Meng's production):
Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God … in spite of the tennis the labours abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard tennis … the stones … so calm … Cunard.Footnote 32
Next to this stone bench are a pair of bare bicycle wheels without the tyres. These will be used by Vladimir and Estragon now and then, especially when they are ‘horsing around’ with Pozzo and Lucky. Upstage, in the back, hangs a segment of Sandro Botticelli's Allegory of Spring (which features Venus, the goddess of love, in a busy scene of pastoral beauty and joy) that functions as a curtain between stage and backstage, where Pozzo, Lucky and the messenger boy will enter and exit. Of course, there is a tree, but it is an artificial, silvery tree hanging upside down from the ceiling centre stage. It presents an upside-down view of the world in which the ‘tree of knowledge’ (or the ‘tree of life’) hangs in the balance, literally.
A noticeable symbolic acting, or creative license, that Meng Jinghui took in this 1991 production was with the character of the unnamed boy messenger, who morphed into two young women dressed in white nurse smocks. They enter through the Allegory of Spring backstage curtain and deliver the same messages (‘Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening, but surely to-morrow’) and give the same monosyllabic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers in the same monotonous, emotionless tone – yet so much new meaning, intended or not, seems to have been added on. If in Beckett's play the boy messenger minds the sheep (and his brother minds goats) for Godot,Footnote 33 in this 1991 production the twin-sister-like nurses seem to be minding a hospital or, rather, mental institution ward where Vladimir and Estragon are confined, although the nurse–messengers do not bring any potent medication for their illness, physical, spiritual or simply existential, or any definitive news the two tramps are dying to know: who exactly is Godot? When will he come?
Furthermore, Meng tried to quicken the pace and cadence of the performance by condensing long speeches such as the one given by Lucky and eliminating some of the pauses and silences. Vladimir and Estragon move around all over the stage and fill up the space, albeit bare and confined, and make ample use of the few props they have – the stone benches, the umbrellas, the upturned bicycle and the set of bare bicycle wheels, the newspaper, and the harmonica (with the only exception of the grand piano, sitting in the upstage right corner silently eye-witnessing it all). They talk, albeit gibberish; they share a carrot; they dance (Lucky being forced to dance a few tap dance steps on the tombstone-like bench, Estragon mimicking him but with more agility and vigor, then Vladimir joining in to show off the ‘correct’ footwork of tap danceFootnote 34); and they horse around, especially with Pozzo and Lucky when they are in the play. All of this interjects some activity into an otherwise ‘nothing-happens’ play.
Sometimes, to help drive home certain thematic messages, Meng's production gives more marked emphasis to certain words than are in Beckett's script. For example, at the opening of the play, Estragon enters from behind the curtain, sits on the big, tombstone-like bench downstage right, and begins to work hard at his boots, trying to take them off – in vain; he continues to try hard while lying full-length on the stone bench. Vladimir enters and sits at the smaller stone bench downstage left, picks up the newspaper, reads, and says, ‘I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. Struggle. Struggle. Struggle.’Footnote 35 By repeating the word ‘struggle’ three times the production gives emphasis to a thematic message as Meng Jinghui perhaps saw in the play (and in the existential crisis Meng and many people like him were experiencing in the aftermath of what had happened in 1989), i.e. that this hopeless and endless waiting is a struggle, personal and existential.
The circular, continuous stream of their existence, of hopeless waiting, is interrupted only by the entrances of Pozzo and Lucky and the messenger in the form of the twin sisters dressed as nurses, once in Act I and once in Act II, creating some disturbance to the seeming monotony of repetitive pattern. Then it all ripples back to where it has always been since yesterday toward an infinite tomorrow. As the play draws toward the end, as Estragon and Vladimir banter about whether to leave or to hang themselves, the stage fades into darkness. Only the silhouettes of the two figures appear against the light coming through the Allegory of Spring curtain backstage, now drawn. On the stage there is a candlelight flickering on the birthday cake sitting on a small stool, and a dead body on the floor, life and death, hope and despair, and light struggling against repressive, enveloping darkness. It signifies Meng's clear-headed sense of the gloom and existential threat closing in and his unyielding determination to hold on to hope for light, for rebirth and for a better future, as he and his Frog Experimental Theatre team have pledged to their audiences (alluded to earlier): ‘we shall never let our body and soul suffer the plight of weakening as we run for life’.Footnote 36
Seven years later, in 1998, China saw two other notable productions by established professional theatre artists, Ren Ming and Lin Zhaohua, both affiliated with the prestigious Beijing People's Art Theatre. By that year, especially since Deng Xiaoping's 1992 Southern Tour, during which he reasserted his reformist platform and commitment to China opening up to the outside world,Footnote 37 the kind of existential crisis that Meng Jinghui and his young cast and crew had experienced when staging their Waiting for Godot had somewhat dissipated, replaced by a different kind of new exigency: to make as much splash in the ‘sea of commerce’ as fast as possible and to consume mass culture and entertainment with a vengeance, as if there were no tomorrow. It is against this sociocultural backdrop that Ren Ming and Lin Zhaohua staged their versions of Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
The first thing one would notice with Ren Ming's production is that he relocated the story from a generic, archetypal ‘country road’ to a specific, historized time and place – a bar in a cosmopolitan city in present-day China.Footnote 38 The two male tramps in Beckett's play now find their Chinese reincarnations in two svelte, glamorous young women. Ren perhaps did this gender change for Vladimir and Estragon without knowing Beckett's objection to casting women in the roles,Footnote 39 although such ‘unauthorized’ casting is not unheard of in the performance history of Waiting for Godot. For her 1993 production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, a besieged city, in the midst of a devastating ethnic war, Susan Sontag cast three pairs of Serbian and Croatian actors for the roles of Vladimir and Estragon, two men, two women and a man and a woman respectively.Footnote 40 Sontag did so as part of ‘her search for a more engaged activism’, which, albeit well intended, created considerable challenges for the actors on the stage and provoked mixed critical responses afterwards.Footnote 41 This gender change for the 1998 Ren Ming production in Beijing, as will be the case for the April 2020 online virtual-theatre production, would make so much difference, giving almost everything Vladimir and Estragon say and everything they do together (for example their sharing of a banana, instead of a carrot as described in Beckett's script, licking it together hungrily and sensually) an unmistakable (homo)erotic twist.Footnote 42
As the curtain rises, we see the two young women, dressed in stylish clothes, sitting on high bar chairs, swinging their slender bodies in tune to jazzy, Western-style music. Immediately, one gets the sense of how far away this production has drifted from the Beckettian world as envisioned in Waiting for Godot. The two female actors deliver their dialogues fluently, in marked Beijing dialect, without the kind of silence, pause or incoherence described in the original play. Their movement is smooth and agile, showing the benefits of good professional training and regular visits to the gym and/or the dance studio, but showing very little connection with the characters they are supposed to portray: two tramps, in both the socio-economic and the philosophical and psychological senses of the term, forever lost in the twilight zone of hope and despair, or with the anxiety of so many people trying to make it in today's world.Footnote 43
Perhaps resetting the play in a bar in a modern city would bring the allegorical play a bit closer to home and therefore make it more accessible to the typical young audience in China today, but at the irreplaceable loss of the richness of symbolic meaning and breadth of existential reference. A definite loss in this production is Lucky being replaced by a female mannequin (missing her body from the waist down), sitting in a bathtub, being dragged onto the stage by Pozzo. Lucky is now dumb throughout the play, denied a chance to deliver the big speech that the 1991 Meng Jinghui production had invested quite a bit of energy and creativity to bring alive on the stage.
Lin Zhaohua's production Three Sisters Waiting for Godot, which happened only a few months after Ren Ming's, is a theatrical mishmash, intermingling, literally, truncated versions of Chekhov's Three Sisters and Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Ostensibly, what interlinks the two plays, one by a Russian playwright, one by an Irish playwright, with half a century of time and space between them, is the common motif of hopeless waiting. In Chekhov's play (1901), three sisters, Olga (the eldest, a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher and spinster), Masha (the middle sister, twenty-three years old, disappointed in her marriage with an older man and falling in love with Lieutenant Colonel Vershinin, an idealistic and philosophical man), and Irina (the youngest sister, twenty years old), along with their brother Andrey, are stuck in a provincial town where very little seems to be happening, where they feel lonely, isolated (despite the frequent visitors) and miserable. They long for Moscow, which stands for passion, true love and the meaning of life. Yet all they do is talk, never doing anything to realize their dream, because they do not know how.
The stage design for the production includes two separate yet interconnected performance areas: a platform for Three Sisters upstage centre, a private space, like an island surrounded by waters, open but confined and barricaded with an invisible wall; and on its outskirts is the performance area for Waiting for Godot, downstage, bare. In addition to the common motif of waiting, what links the two stories is Pu Cunxin, one of the best-known actors in China, who plays the dual role of Vladimir in Waiting for Godot and Vershinin in Three Sisters, a ‘busybody’, literally, who pops in and out of the two stories trying to interweave them into one coherent theatrical event. It would take the audiences – even the well informed among them – a while to get attuned to this ‘see-saw’ pattern of representation and to appreciate what is happening on the stage.
To help reinforce the link between the two stories, Lin Zhaohua, the director, had the same actor, Wu Wenguang, play the role of Chebutykin, a sixty-year-old army doctor who is a family friend of the three Chekhovian sisters, and the boy messenger of Beckett's play. This old man/boy messenger, perched atop a platform stage right between the two performance areas, provides an offstage narration and commentary from his vantage point as the dual story unfolds, thus creating a Brechtian Verfremgdungseffekt and metatheatrical effect so that audiences know what they are seeing on the stage is not ‘life as it is’, but actors trying to stage a show. According to Wu, Lin wanted the actors to act and speak more naturally, as in real life.Footnote 44 The actors might have tried hard to do so, but could not completely forget that they were actually performing onstage, not living life in a ‘wall-less’ world.
Most of the time, what happens on the stage is like two duelling choirs taking turns to take centre stage: sometimes the spotlight shines on the three Russian sisters (sitting there, statuesque, looking out to the imaginary sea, or the Moscow they are dreaming of returning to) as they talk and argue about their melancholy; sometimes the banter between Estragon and Vladimir ascends, with the three sisters’ statuesque figures, now dimmed, as the backdrop; sometimes Vladimir (Pu Cunxin) snaps out of Waiting for Godot, runs toward where the three sisters sit and talks to them from outside the dome-like invisible wall, hopelessly separated from each other by the insurmountable barrier of time and space between the China of 1998, the archetypal no man's land envisioned by Beckett, and Chekhov's turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russia. Apparently, there is much more ‘action’ to enact the ‘inaction’ of the two sets of interconnected characters, in part to engage and maintain the interest of theatre-goers in Beijing, yet it is not clear whether more ‘action’ necessarily adds to the depth and intensity of the theatrical experience.
‘Waiting’ during a harrowing pandemic
One theatre artist, who was too young at the time of Lin Zhaohua's 1998 production and missed it during its short run, saw the performance video many years later and was profoundly shaken: ‘Director Lin shows us a bird's-eye view of humanity, of ourselves, with pity and fear. I feel as if I had performed the role of each of the three sisters. Vladimir is me. Estragon is me, too.’Footnote 45 Wang Chong (1982–), the young theatre artist, did not have to wait long before he would stage his own take on the Beckettian challenge – in April 2020.
The instigation and circumstance of Wang Chong's production reminds one of the 2007 production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, staged by Paul Chan and the Classical Theatre of Harlem (New York), with free site-specific performances in neighbourhoods destroyed by Hurricane Katrina,Footnote 46 and the 2011 short production (less than five minutes long) in Fukushima rocked by a devastating earthquake and ensuing nuclear reactor meltdowns.Footnote 47 By April 2020, China, having been shut down for months as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc with the world, was just beginning to reopen, albeit slowly and gingerly.Footnote 48 According to Wang Chong, director of this online, virtual theatre production (live-streamed), he began to work on the project in early March during a two-week ‘sheltering’ at home after a month-long stay in Australia and then another three-day visit to Japan in February for various theatre projects.Footnote 49 Wang took on this endeavour in the same spirit as he did all the bold productions of classics, Chinese or Western, that he has been staging for quite a few years, e.g. Thunderstorm 2.0 (a remake of one of the most important modern Chinese plays, by Cao Yu, 1937) and Ghosts 2.0 (a remake of Ibsen's 1881 play). For Wang Chong, his 2.0 endeavours are supposed to be subversions of the original 1.0s – rethinking, remaking and renewing, especially in style, so the classics will have a new voice and have something new to say.Footnote 50
True to form, Wang Chong's Waiting for Godot was a self-consciously experimental, boundary-pushing production: the cast and crew, all sheltering in their homes in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan (the first epicentre of the pandemic) and elsewhere, were rehearsing and performing online, on the virtual stage, for the hundreds of thousands of ‘theatre-goers’ to see through live-streaming by means of social media platforms. It was an audacious experiment keenly aware of its potential sociocultural and artistic significance, a historicized version of Beckett's philosophical allegory that attempted to have something to say about the human condition during a harrowing pandemic. What it wanted to say or accomplish is unambiguously stated in the promotional pitch for this production: ‘Say no to region-based discrimination with live theatre; Reconnect isolated human hearts with art and theatre forever.’
The first notably ‘new’ thing in this Waiting for Godot 2.0 is the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon, who have now morphed into Fufu and Ganggang, a young white-collar Chinese couple, channelled by Li Jialong (sheltering at home in Datong, a northwestern city on the Huangtu plateau) and Ma Zhuojun (sheltering in her high-rise apartment in Beijing) respectively. This gender and relationship switch changes almost everything the two main characters say, as they banter, each sheltering in his or her own place, together yet separate, stuck in a relationship that is not going anywhere.
When the countdown is over for the show to begin on 5 April, we see on the screen Ganggang, thirty-ish, in pink pajamas, sitting on a hardwood floor, trying to untie and remove her expensive high-heeled shoes, the dresser in the back featuring a framed picture of her and a man, also thirty-ish, showing them to be a couple. Then a second screen comes up. We see someone getting a glass of water and drinking it thirstily. It is Fufu, the man in Ganggang's framed picture. The backdrop for Fufu consists of bookshelves with a few Chinese artefacts on display; a man and a woman sitting on a couch apparently engaged in an earnest conversation (although we cannot hear them); another young man, further upstage (if we can call this a stage because it is the apartment of Li Jialong cast in the role of Fufu/Vladimir), back facing the audience, working at a computer desk. They form the tableau for Fufu for much of Act I. We now know this is going to be a tale of two young people, a couple, one stuck at home, one stuck at the workplace, all because of the raging pandemic.
After checking his own temperature with a handheld infrared thermometer and the temperature of the three business associates in the backdrop, Fufu comes closer to the camera and talks to Ganggang. Their banter, while true to the spirit and sentiment of Waiting for God (Beckett's original play), is adapted so it flows for real-time, real-life-like delivery. It now sounds ‘twisted’ to mean more than originally intended by Beckett:Footnote 51
fufu: I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
ganggang: I thought so too.
fufu: Let's celebrate then. How? Let us hug.
ganggang: No way! Not now!
…
fufu: Where did you spend the night?
ganggang: In a ditch.
…
fufu: Come to think of it, all these years … but for me … where would you be … You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.
ganggang: So?
…
ganggang: It'd be better if we parted.
fufu: You always say that and you always come crawling back.
Apparently, this relationship (it is not clear whether they are married) has gone through some difficult time and the Beckettian existential crisis now takes an additional wrinkle, if not crisis. Here is another scene, not too far into Act II of this April 2020 production:Footnote 52
ganggang: And all that was yesterday, you say?
fufu: Yes of course it was yesterday.
ganggang: And here where we are now?
fufu: Where else do you think? Do you not recognize the place?
ganggang: (suddenly furious, running to the big window of her high-rise apartment, opening it to show a well-lit cityscape churning out there). Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I've crawled about in the mud, and you talk to me about the scenery!
fufu: (screaming, worried that ganggang is about to jump off the window). Calm yourself! Calm yourself!
As in the original play, Fufu and Ganggang are waiting for Godot. They also take Pozzo to be Godot when he first arrives with much fanfare – donning a pair of sunglasses, a flashy jacket, singing and dancing (James Corden's ‘carpool karaoke’-style) in a luxury car (cruising along a street in Beijing), except that Lucky, his slave, is not in the same car – Li Boyang, cast for the role, performs in his apartment in the faraway city of Wuhan. When Pozzo suddenly coughs, the other three, Fufu, Ganggang and Lucky, terrified that they might catch the virus, grab for their face masks. When Lucky finally gets to deliver the big speech (‘Given the existence … alas the stones Cunard tennis … the stones … so calm … Cunard’) two-thirds of the way into Act I,Footnote 53 none of the other three pays much attention – they look bored, they yawn, and Ganggang leaves the screen before Lucky finishes. As probably can be expected for this ‘high-tech’ 2.0 production, the role of the messenger boy is assigned to a robot that speaks in a monotonous, digitized voice.
When Pozzo re-enters in Act II, as in the original play,Footnote 54 he becomes a patient suffering from COVID-19. Wrapped in striped pyjamas in a hospital bed, he receives an intravenous (IV) injection; on the nightstand by the bed is a big male urinal atop which sits a box of ‘Shuanghuanglian oral solution’,Footnote 55 a Chinese herbal medicine (administered ‘to induce diaphoresis and to remove toxic heat in the treatment of fever, cough and sore throat due to affection by exopathogen of wind-heat’) believed by many to be effective for treating COVID-19.Footnote 56 Pozzo keeps moaning in pain and crying ‘Help’!
One of the highlights of the entire virtual theatre performance, at least for the hundreds of thousands in the live-streaming audience,Footnote 57 is when Pozzo and Lucky exit the play again (after Pozzo's speech: ‘… one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?’Footnote 58). In the original play, they leave and we do not see them again. In this Wang Chong production, we see Lucky (or Li Boyang, a native son of Wuhan), now in the driver's seat, cruising along the streets of a city deeply scarred by the pandemic, physically, socio-economically and psychologically, for almost two minutes in real time, hope written all over his face. As he finally passes the Yellow Crane Tower (Huanghe lou),Footnote 59 an iconic landmark of the city, well lit, looming against the evening sky, seemingly untouched and perhaps untarnished by the pandemic in its two-thousand-year glory, one can hear a collective sigh of relief, or rather cheer of bittersweet joy, across Wuhan and indeed across all of China.
Nonetheless, there seems no other way to end the performance but in the same Beckettian note, albeit with a slight Chinese twist. Fufu and Ganggang, the couple, each lying in his or her own bed at his or her own place, as if turning in for the night:Footnote 60
ganggang: I can't go on like this.
fufu: That's what you think.
ganggang: If we parted? That might be better for us.
fufu: We'll hang ourselves tomorrow. Unless Godot comes.
The camera zooms in on Fufu's face as he gets emotional, tears welling up in his eyes, before the curtain falls, or rather before the screen fades to darkness.
Wang Chong's Waiting for Godot 2.0, adding a wrinkle of exigency (a global pandemic) to the theme of existential crisis, and a wrinkle of emptiness (despite, or thanks to, unapologetic consumerism, as evidenced by the pile of expensive shoes on the chaise in Ganggang's high-rise apartment, the luxury car Pozzo drives and so on), and staged in a virtual theatre, joins the list of productions in the world in response to natural disasters, wars and sociopolitical crises. Some among the hundreds of thousands who live-streamed the production via various social media platforms went so ecstatic as to claim that the Chinese have finally and for the first time understood Waiting for Godot – because now they know the answer to the question ‘Who is Godot’? For them and perhaps for the hundreds of millions of Chinese, the Godot they have been waiting for is the end of the pandemic, the reopening of the city and the reopening of the country – it does not have to be anything esoteric, archetypal and profound.Footnote 61 Some, however, were drawn to the hype of an unprecedented theatrical event, only to be perplexed and even bored. At least one such audience member left at the end of Act I and went to play computer games instead.Footnote 62
As in the case of the 1993 production in Sarajevo, which led to some serious reflections on nihilism, tragedy and apocalypse,Footnote 63 and the 2007 production in New Orleans, which challenged scholars to try and reconcile (once again) the ‘apparent incongruity’ of placing a ‘difficult, opaque, and abstract play’ at the centre of a sociopolitically self-conscious endeavour,Footnote 64 Wang Chong's Waiting for Godot has provoked some theatre critics to reflect on questions concerning remakes of classics; the ‘liveness’ of theatre production; social media as platforms for the theatre; and dynamics between acting, audience and space.Footnote 65 One theatre critic characterized this production as a celebration of ‘earnest mediocrity’ (of the characters in the play),Footnote 66 feeling acutely what is lost in experiencing this play in a virtual theatre versus experiencing the live production in a real theatre. He wonders aloud what is left in the core, once the veneer of novelty, of blurring the lines between life and theatre and between art and life, wears itself off. Such reflections will probably continue in the days and years ahead as Chinese theatre artists persist in their search for Godot – whatever Godot stands for – instead of waiting for Godot to come to them, trying over and over again with each new creative and audacious endeavour, staged in the theatre, online or in open public spaces, in the Beckettian spirit as enunciated enigmatically in Worstward Ho.
