Mullingars wait for Godot at an end

Mullingar has been chosen as one of the venues that the renowned Samuel Beckett play `Waiting for Godot` will be shown on its 32-county tour of Ireland later this year, it has just been announced.

'Waiting for Godot' will be staged in Mullingar Arts Centre on Mullingar Arts Centre on Wednesday, October 8. Actors are bringing the production to 40 venues across 32 counties over an eight weeks period in September and October to celebrate Dublin`s Gate Theatre 80th anniversary.

The actors, who include Alan Stanford, Barry McGovern and Stephen Brennan featured in the original Gate performance of this Beckett classic 20 years ago. Gate director, Michael Colgan explained that the previous Irish touring record for any play is eight venues in seven weeks.

'It will require huge amounts of stamina and energy by the actors. One advantage (about Godot) is we won`t have to carry huge sets from venue to venue,' says Mr Colgan.

'He is bleak, but he is moving up the scale in terms of popularity. A survey among theatre-goers in the UK found Waiting for Godot was their favourite play after Death of A Salesman'.

Waiting for Godot is a much-interpreted play about two characters waiting for somebody called Godot who never, ever arrives. Tickets for the event are on sale now at Mullingar Art Centre, 044 9347777.

The plot of Samuel Beckett`s Waiting for Godot is a simple one, with many interpretations .

Two tramps wait on a bleak landscape beside a dying tree waiting for Mr Godot to arrive. While they wait, they quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot and gnaw on some chicken bones.

Two other characters appear, Pozzo and Lucky, a master and a slave and a young boy arrives to say that Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow.

The language of the play has gravity, intensity, and conciseness and many believe it is a comment on both man`s absurd hope in the face of disappointment and loss and on the insignificance of a single man in the face of time moving on.

The tree is like a gallows calling to the tramps, with the fresh leaves perhaps a sign of some order coming into the random chaos of the men`s lives. As the play unfolds, we realise that Godot will not come, he will never exist in the same place as the tramps. The despair is created by the tramps, who cannot not wait for Godot but Godot will never come.

Mr. Beckett himself has repudiated all theories of a symbolic nature. But this does not necessarily mean that it is useless to search for such clues. The fundamental imagery of the play is Christian. Even the tree recalls the Tree of Knowledge and the Cross. The life of the tramps at many points in the text seems synonymous with the fallen state of man and their strange relationship is a kind of marriage. The play is a series of actions that are aborted and that give a despairing uniformity to its duration.

Voted 'the most significant English language play of the 20th century', 'Waiting for Godot' is Beckett`s translation of his own original French version, 'En attendant Godot', and is subtitled 'a tragicomedy in two acts'.The original French text was written between 9th October 1948 and 29th January 1949.