Waiting for Godot

Performance

A play in two acts

Samuel Beckett
Directed by Rimas Tuminas

Duration – 3 hrs
Premiere date – 22nd December, 2002
Premiere date of the renewed performance – 25th May, 2006

Upcoming dates

Team

Translated from French by

Antanas Gudelis

Set design

Adomas Jacovskis

Music design

Faustas Latėnas

Costume and make-up design

Vilma Galeckaitė-Dabkienė

Acting

ESTRAGON

Andrius Žebrauskas

VLADIMIR

Arvydas Dapšys

POZZO

Mindaugas Capas

LUCKY

Balys Latėnas

A BOY

Daumantas Ciunis

Every single performance by Rimas Tuminas is born out of the inner life of The Small Theatre – its rhythm, mood, and need. Waiting for Godot was born at the very end of 2002 in the unfurnished and unheated premises of the theatre. This environment helped to create the impression not only of Theatrum Povera, but also of a creative workshop, of art being born this very moment. Waiting for Godot has grown together with this environment so that the latter has become a real set for this performance. The director Rimas Tuminas and set designer Adomas Jacovskis tried to look attentively at this empty and poor, but inspiring “live” creation space and attempted to take it over carefully. Furthermore, here Rimas Tuminas tried to realize his dream “to produce a performance without producing and to perform without performing”.

Later Waiting for Godot did not naturalize in any other space, so it had to wait until the reopening of the theatre which took place in 2005.

Director Rimas Tuminas took a different look, from an absolutely unexpected angle, to the play of the absurd theatre classic Samuel Beckett. Although Tuminas is interested in the theatrical side of life, or, in other words, life as a theatre, but in the performance Waiting for Godot he performs a kind of reverse procedure, turning the theatre into life, into the “fair of life” as the director says. He gives a naive and sincere character to the play's main characters Vladimir and Estragon; gives life-like faithfulness for apparently theatrical situations, and “eases out” the Beckettian linguistics, turning it into something inherent to the characters. Vladimir and Estragon, usually depicted as deformed, fragmented personages in other presentations, subdued to spiritless automatism of life, here are the characters full of energy and life.

The actors, not the director, are the leaders of a performance full of play, improvisation, laughter and at the same time a strange “dreaminess”. Improvisation virtuoso Andrius Žebrauskas seems to have inexhaustible acting abilities, and together with the equally talented Arvydas Dapšius, he captures the audience's attention, making them experience a wide range of emotions.

From the reviews

Gabija Gruodytė, from the daily newspaper “Lietuvos rytas”

“However, despair could be perceived in the characters' movements and faces, which is imperceptibly made “insignificant” by the actors. Thus acting containing not a drop of sentimentality, the antibody of the absurd, corresponds best to the reflections of S. Beckett himself, which he told in a letter to Marcel Proust: life is a habit. And the director colours those ideas of S. Beckett with an exceptionally reserved lyricism.”

Literatūra ir menas, monthly cultural newspaper

“Arvydas Dapšys’ and Andrius Žebrauskas’ earlier roles still haunt the audience during the first minutes; the performance could still be understood as their variation, however soon they really attract Beckett's characters to themselves so powerfully that any gap between the characters and actors disappears. The two of them really create a consistent life on the stage - with their movements, their sensation for when comedy turns into tragedy and, on the contrary, when the episode should merge with the general sequence of the performance, with their characters' precisely “cut” manners, finally - with an almost physical sense of the flow of time on the stage.”

L. Vansevičienės nuotr.