Talk about Landscapes: What There Is to Recognize

I

Early on in the second act of Waiting for Godot, Estragon, a dog-eared Beckett bum who claims to have once been a poet ("Isn't that obvious?"[9]), expresses considerable dismay at the un-"inspiring prospects" of what can only be described as a minimalist's scène à faire: "Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I've crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! (Looking wildly about him.) Look at this muckheap! . . . You and your landscapes!" (39). Though the intrepid Vladimir urges him to "calm" himself by staying the course, critics of the play have, by and large, come round to Gogo's assessment of his unenviable situation in this empty performance space. "A country road. A tree. Evening," the famous stage direction that sets the outdoor scene on a spare platform never dressed quite the same way before (3), would give even a visionary director like Peter Brook more than a moment's pause (as it did so, indeed; witness his landmark productions of King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company, each in its own way an energetic response to the new Godot scenography, the former with a menacing touch of Endgame in the air).¹ In Beckett's play, there's a tree, of course, with - lest we forget - its well-placed leaves added surreptitiously by a conscientious stagehand during the interval separating the not quite equally paced two acts. There's a bit more to it than that, too: a mound, a pair (or two) of shoes that don't quite fit; a radish, black; a supply of turnips; and one never-to-be- forgotten carrot that turns out to taste, well, like a carrot. Yet in comparison to Ibsen, one would have to admit, there's not a lot here to write home about. "The only thing I'm sure of," the playwright said of his players, reduced as they are to such a decrepit stage reality, "is that they're wearing bowler hats" (qtd. in Brater, Why Beckett 62).

Empty though it may be - but not "empty" in the sense the playwright will explore in his late, great works of the 1970s and 1980s - the set for Waiting for Godot is, nonetheless, filled with a material allure that is constantly seeking to redefine itself. The play "must have," as the German director Walter Asmus recently observed, "a conceivable, real background." This is not a form of recognition such as Aristotle discusses in The Poetics; for, in Godot, the anagnorisis of Greek drama is replaced by something much more elementary but no less dramatically complex: the virtue of setting, then resetting, the landscape of the stage with things seen, then unseen, on the place Pozzo thinks might very well be "the Board" (55). What there is to recognize in this diminished space might be best understood by considering the dynamics of the various landscapes struggling to impose themselves, suggestively, on the audience's imagination. These might be outlined as follows:

• █ the stark but richly articulated exterior scene we see before us on the stage

• █ landscapes that serve as the setting for offstage action

• █ pictures of some other world that can only be imagined

• █ landscapes from the past, which serve to illuminate the back story the characters (more or less) remember.

Negotiations here will be very much to the point, Gogo's frustration notwithstanding.

Let us begin with "the local situation,"² the kinetic image of waiting Beckett creates on a single set, as the curtain slowly rises on his "twilight" drama (if, indeed, there is to be a curtain; Beckett was certainly thinking of one in 1953, when Godot opened on the intimate box-set of the Théâtre de Babylone on the boulevard Raspail in Paris [Cohn 134-80]). Positioned onstage with much precision and authority, that image will prove to be remarkably flexible, at times even unstable, as the dramatic action, such as it is, begins to unfold. Gogo and Didi repeatedly examine the haunting stage image to which this play has them...