THEATER REVIEW: Living the absurd (05/11/97)

THEATER REVIEW: Living the absurd

by Irena Koval

KYIV - The barnacles of erudition fall away from the first Ukrainian production of Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot" at Kyiv's Experimental Theater, a theater in residence at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The actors and director Ala Zamans are fortunate not to have had access to volumes filled with scholars' interpretations of the play. The fresh, dynamic production is in marked contrast to the versions I saw some time ago in London and Cambridge, Mass., which seemed pickled specimens in comparison, safe and sterile examples of the theater of the absurd from drama anthologies.

In the UKMA production, a telephone pole stands center stage covered in advertisements to which strips of telephone numbers are attched that one vagrant called Vladimir tears off and feeds to another tramp named Estragon. A telephone, a faulty lamp activated by Vladimir's singing, a ladder, and oil drum serve as the props in the purgatory to which the two are condemned.

Estragon (A. Petrov) is a wit, wiry, scrawny, suspicious, prone to poetry and parody. Vladimir (Y. Chornenkii) is a stutterer, naive, lanky, practical and ponderous. Both are caught in a state of suspension where nothing happens or, for that matter, will ever happen. To mark time they humor themselves with constant rounds of improvisation. Vladimir (Chornenkii is a talented musician) sings and beats out Beckett's text on the oil drum in reggae rhythms. The two tramps sit with their bodies intertwined and deliver the dialogue with dizzying speed, parodying a cheap, facile communication. The actors throw out scraps of cliches in Russian, French, English, German, Polish which add another ironic dimension to their isolation.

A black, leather-jacketed SS-type master called Pozzo (V. Lehin) and his slave-cohort Lucky (V. Oleksiyenko) intrude on the havoc. In one of the strongest scenes in the production, Pozzo manufactures tears with a water pistol and transforms his face into a hideous mass of cruelty and innocence.

With a brilliant mix of precision and spontaneity, Estragon and Vladimir develop a crude, often vulgar, intimacy contradicted by moments of desperate isolation when each crawls into the oil drum for comfort. In this world where Godot is eternally on the point of arriving, where uncertainty oscillates with hope, and anticipation is repeatedly followed by disappointment, Estragon and Vladimir stir the audience with their infectious urge to participate in that tainted, dangerous, often meaningless existence.

Cultural isolation cuts both ways. If actors in Kyiv often feel that they are working in a vacuum, cut off from the cross-fertilization of the West, they are also blessed with the need to rely on their own impulses and instincts. The production at UKMA is perhaps richer, more complex and open to a multitude of interpretations as a result of the actors' and directors' hunger to make meaning out of the absurdity around them. Left to their own resources, they dig deeper into themselves and explore rather than mimic Beckett's sense of mystery and bewilderment.

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