Walter Asmus first worked with Samuel Beckett in 1985 on Where What. As his Gate production of Waiting for Godot returns, he writes about his relationship with the playwright
I last worked with Samuel Beckett in Stuttgart in 1985, on the television version of What Where. I remember vividly the never-ending shaping and re-shaping of this 12-minute piece. For two weeks, four actors sat side by side in barber chairs with headrests, immobile.
Once, we had to decide whether a certain device should be used. After long consideration, Beckett pronounced it, scornfully, "a gimmick" - and it was dropped.
By the end of the shooting, we had achieved a little masterpiece of the utmost simplicity. We sat silently over a beer, in the grip of the sadness and melancholy that comes with the completion of the work. Eventually, I broke the silence, saying "All gimmicks gone". Beckett sat there, silent. Then he looked up at me, a little flicker in his eye, and asked "All?" And he joined in the general laughter.
His reply was misquoted as "All? - you can't tell". Given the ambiguity that is an essential part of his work, Beckett would never have ended "you can't tell".
He would have denied the importance of the open end - open for the others, the audience, to find out, to decide and to conclude. The doubt about the doing.
When Samuel Beckett came to Berlin in 1974 to direct the - by now legendary - production of Waiting for Godot at the Schiller Theatre, I was lucky enough to become his assistant. To everybody's amazement, he began rehearsals by saying that he wanted to "give confusion a shape". This to a play, which, with its precise stage directions and clean-cut language, was already universally regarded as the ne-plus-ultra of "shape".
He had prepared a director's notebook with over 100 pages of sketches and references, in which every move of the actors was fixed in detail. And yet this precise concept had to prove its validity anew at every rehearsal. If there were any doubts about anything, or if actors made a proposal, he was ready with a new suggestion the following day.
Looking at my old script, I find changes and cuts being made right throughout the rehearsal process. Even after the first dress rehearsal, a cut of more than two pages was made in Pozzo's scene in Act Two, simply because the practical work on that section had remained unsatisfactory.
In this way, a script incorporating cuts, inversions in the text and changes in translation came about. The structure of the play was clarified by using identical words in repetitive lines; themes and echoes were worked out in textual ways, as well as physically on stage.
When I prepared to direct Godot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 1978, I compared the new German text with the original French and Beckett's own English translation.
There were quite a few differences, including several lines, which were missing in the English text. Beckett commented wryly: "It's a bad translation. . ."
In the present production, we are following to a large extent the text which arose from the Schiller (1975), New York (1978) and San Quentin productions (1984), and which will shortly go into print.
We did, however, put back in some lines, because we like them - including, in a reduced version, Pozzo's business with the pipe, about which Beckett had said to me: "If the actor can handle it, you are free to use it".
This revealing remark explains the changes that have been made over the years: what the writer had visualised in his mind had to stand up to the practicalities on stage. His work has always been a work in progress. Like a sculptor, he tried to get rid of all redundant elements in the play.
In this way, he achieved on the one hand the utmost reduction and simplicity; and, on the other, manifold expression in his later works.
But, above all, it will always be the diligent investigation and exploration of the script, in conjunction with the striving for simplicity, that will reveal the world of this play. Get rid of gimmicks to find a shade of truth . . . whatever that is.
A gala performance of Waiting for Godot at the Gate Theatre tomorrow night, exactly 50 years after its first performance, is in aid of the Gate's building development programme (tickets cost €50). The play opens on Tuesday and runs until February 1st.