Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett | Theodoros Terzopoulos
Dates
Tickets
Venue
Time & Date
Tickets
Information
Premiere
12 January 2023, Teatro Storchi (Modena, Italy)
Presale information
*Onassis Stegi Neighbors can purchase their tickets only at the Onassis Stegi Box Office from Wednesday to Friday, between 12:00 and 18:00. Access from the “Artists Entrance” on Galaxia Street.
Onassis Stegi Friends presale: from Wednesday, 17 April, 17:00
General presale: from Wednesday, 24 April, 17:00
Performance information
The performance is in Italian with Greek surtitles.
Duration
90 minutes
Introduction
The world-renowned Greek director and the theatrical play that defined the 20th century in its first presentation at Onassis Stegi. A major co-production of the Emilia Romagna Teatro and a theatrical milestone, teetering between the monumental and the comic.
“We are all born mad, some remain so.”
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Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
“Nothing is more real than nothing,” said Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), and with Waiting for Godot, he launches this “nothing” like a meteorite onto the stage. For, nothing remarkable in terms of stage action and plot happens in the work of the Nobel Prize-winner Irish thinker, poet, and writer. Two street pariahs, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, dressed in rags, stand by a tree, chit-chat trivially, and meet by chance two or three equally weird figures, while basically, they are waiting for someone who never shows up. Who, after all, is Godot of the title who never shows up? Some savior or God himself, as his name implies (God-ot)? Becket has, however, admitted that he was not interested so much in Godot as in “Waiting.”
This endless waiting is approached direction-wise by Theodoros Terzopoulos with a sense of tragicomic officiation. In his performance, a black gallows pole is erected on stage like a funerary monument. A cross of light tears it in half. At its base is a tiny bonsai tree. Church hymns, tangos, bombings, and air raid sirens resound. There, like figures who were restored to life from an unknown ancient frieze, refraining from looking or touching each other, lie and wait Vladimir and Estragon, played by veteran Sicilian actors Enzo Vetrano and Stefano Randisi. They swoop in their respective roles with the madcap wisdom and holy despair of Buster Keaton. Figures that are bizarre and contradictory, witty as well as naïve, blabber on while waiting statically and ecstatically for the one who will never come to save them from their existential cul de sac of always waiting for something.
The play by Terzopoulos—the director who began from Makrygialos in the region of Pieria and in the last forty years travels the world with Attis Theatre, teaching his much-admired acting method from Asia to Australia—unveils “a crucified humanity in which the nails are words,” as noted in the foreign press, before concluding that this is “a performance that will be included in the annals of contemporary theater.”
Who, after all, is Godot of the title who never shows up? Some savior or God himself, as his name implies (God-ot)?
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Our show is set in the “ruins of the world,” in a future, more or less, close to us, where all present and past wounds remain open. So do our expectations… At this threshold of human existence, what are the minimum possible conditions to re-ignite life, a life worth living? In “Waiting for Godot,” there are two possible answers, and this is where we found our work:
The first is the effort to communicate and co-exist with the Other, the one who is right in front of us, despite all obstacles, even when these seem insurmountable! The second is the effort to communicate with the Other within us, with that impenetrable and dark region of repressed desires and fears, of forgotten senses and instincts, the territory of the animalistic and the divine, where madness and dream, delirium and nightmare, are born.
This is the journey we have tried to delve into: toward the Other within us and the Other beyond us, opposite, away from us. Waiting for what exactly? The Absolution of life from the shackles of death? The encounter with the Human? The end of all humiliation inflicted by humans on humans? Nothing or Waiting, as Becket notes with a tone of irony?
Yet, is there any other way to envision the emancipated man, without demolishing the walls that separate “inside” from “outside”?
-Theodoros Terzopoulos
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Internationally renowned Greek director and founder of a unique method of actor training that is taught in theater and classical departments in more than thirty universities and national drama schools worldwide, Theodoros Terzopoulos is clearly forging a different kind of theater. He never talks about roles, characters, or psychological motivations. However, he does talk about the body of the actor, the god Dionysus, and the notion of the ritual. Since 1985 and the foundation of Attis Theater, and with the trailblazing performance of Euripides' “Bacchae” in 1986, which radically transformed the way ancient Greek tragedy had been presented until then, introducing elements of extreme physicality and ritual, he has given more than 2,100 performances all over the world: works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Brecht, Lorca, Müller, Beckett, Pasternak, Strindberg, and contemporary Greek writers.
International studies and books on Theodoros Terzopoulos' directorial method have been published in more than ten languages, including the recent double edition, in English and Arabic, by the historical German publishing house Theater der Zeit, entitled “The Return of Dionysus,” which was released with the support of the Onassis Foundation. Read more: Supported by Onassis Culture, “The Return of Dionysus” by Theodoros Terzopoulos is published in English and Arabic by the German publishing house Theater der Ζeit.
The first collaboration between Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Onassis Foundation took place in 2018, with the support of a tribute to the director in the form of a four-day International Symposium at Delphi and the presentation of Euripides' “Trojan Women” at the Ancient Theatre of Delphi, entitled "The Return of Dionysus" and organized by the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. Read more: "The Return of Dionysus": A Tribute to Theodoros Terzopoulos.
What they have said about Theodoros Terzopoulos:
"In his theater, myth is no fairytale but accumulated experience [...], an adventurous journey in the landscape of memory, a quest for the lost keys of unity between body and logos […] for the word as a physical entity, which is something Hölderlin discusses in the notes to his translations of Sophocles' works."
—Heiner Müller, writer, poet, playwright, and director
"Theodoros Terzopoulos' method is Socratic: the perception that we all bear within us the past, our ancestors, and participate in a collective memory inscribed on our bodies as well as our minds."
—Etel Adnan, writer, poet, and visual artist
"... Seeing means seeing an image of truth through multiple images. That is what has inscribed itself clearly on my memory, leaving space to revisit and to think. That is what makes his work so special."
—Robert Wilson, director and visual artist
Reviews on “Waiting for Godot”:
“The Greek director uses Beckett’s text, re-molds it, and transforms it into the verbal stele of a visual installation that reveals a humanity bleeding, a crucified humanity, whose nails are words stabbed on the soul, words that speak of a painful void, where speech is not a dialogue but a monologue consisting of unanswered questions. [...] Terzopoulos' ‘Waiting for Godot’ is a stage machine that asks the viewer to surrender to the compositions shaped by the actors' bodies and the stage space in a never-ending wait, in an invitation to grope an ‘elsewhere’ inevitably deserted."
—SIPARIO
"Terzopoulos, internationally considered the Master of Direction [...] sets Beckett once again in motion, sensing a way paved by the Irishman himself. This becomes immediately perceived as soon as the performance begins and the stage installation reveals its dimensions as an intermediate space, a sewer, or an ultramodern house of the future (inspired by geometries pitched somewhere between Bauhaus and the Doric order), in which Vladimir and Estragon (Stefano Randisi and Enzo Vetrano) lie with their heads together like Siamese twins and, as they play, touch and feel each other's faces."
—HUFFINGTONPOST.IT
"Samuel Beckett's ‘Waiting for Godot,’ as you've never seen it before. Powerful and catalytic. It bears the signature of a Master, Theodoros Terzopoulos. A group of superb actors finds its backbone in the duo of Stefano Randisi and Enzo Vetrano. Together, in a performance primed to go down in the annals of contemporary theater, Paolo Musio, a steady collaborator of Terzopoulos, and the promising youngsters Giulio Germano Cervi and Rocco Ancarola. Indeed, a fine group of bright actors in the service of a rewrite of Beckett's masterpiece helped lift the veil and find unimaginable ways to create a show that is an accomplishment both for the art of acting—rarely have I seen such exuberant and inspiring actors—and for the art of directing."
—GliStatiGenerali.com
"I must point out that the fundamental value of Terzopoulos' direction lies in the fact that it constantly deconstructs and reconstructs Beckett's text, or, more precisely, nullifies its known readings and restores the truth of the text itself. This is a valuable as well as rare example of how a director can serve an author by shedding light on his message and amplifying it. And further on, by shedding light on the author's ‘timelessness’ in the world, history, and contemporary society. [...] Terzopoulos pushes theater beyond itself, reminding us that we live in a world much greater than the stage and that, in particular, the words of Beckett's text that we hear on stage echo the 'voices' of a war within a world much greater than the stage."
—Controscena.net
"When one meets a Maestro, one realizes that words carry a different and special weight; they possess a certain depth; they regain echoes and reflections. That was exactly the case with the excellent Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos, whose performances have been presented all over the world. An artist and a brilliant intellectual, creator of a method taught in drama schools and universities, from which the determination to fuse the ancient with the contemporary to create a breathing legacy pours out crystal clear.”
—La Lettura / Corriere della Sera
"A black box. A luminous cross. The protagonists lying on the ground. And the sound of a distant war. The performance of Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos is not to be missed. Can a text’s direction be faithful to the author's intentions, even if these are seemingly obscured? It surely can if the goal remains the same: to touch the audience's hearts. It is a paradox then that Godot's expectation turns the unexpected into something deeply familiar in Samuel Beckett's poetics."
—L'Espresso
