'Waiting for Godot' Designer's program notes

'A country road. A tree. [A stone]'

Those are the first few words of Beckett’s classic script.  From a designer’s point of view staging requirements don’t come much simpler. Yet like the rest of Beckett’s play these few words leave us with more questions than answers. It presents in its simplicity infinite visual possibilities leaving the designer with a staggeringly broad canvas to fill.

When writing Godot Beckett was partially influenced by the classic silent films of Keaton and Chaplain.  It is very tempting as a designer to stage Godot in this familiar setting, placing it firmly in the past, with the characters becoming the well loved clown/tramps of the era. For our production though, this approach seemed just a little too comfortable. One of the most important elements for Director Michael Hill and myself was to preserve Beckett’s extreme ambiguity, to provide the viewer with some familiar visual references while ultimately allowing each member of the audience to draw their own individual meaning.

 Beckett was also visually inspired by the paintings of German Romantic artist Casper David Friedrich. Friedrich’s paintings frequently feature distant figures wandering in epic, awe inspiring landscapes, sometimes dwarfed by towering trees or monolithic ruins looming out of the mist. Friedrich’s tiny figures often gaze into the distance personifying the artist’s expression of man’s search for the sublime.

The ‘country’ I have suggested in this production is not so much a quaint European rural setting but one that echoes a rather more contemporary experience. A countryside that has been exploited and abandoned. A ruined landscape on the outskirts of a past civilisation where ghostly shapes loom in the background; stones? a city? or crumbling towers?
In this design I have attempted to combine all these elements with a dash of the here and now to create a place that is neither past, present or future, yet evokes elements of them all. Beckett’s characters wait in a desolate, dream like landscape lost in time and space.
It is my hope that this approach will help to make one of the Twentieth Century’s most significant plays all the more familiar, challenging, tragic and funny; keeping the Godot debate alive for our Twenty-first Century audience.

Victoria Lamb 2006