Putting the body back into Beckett

THE ARTS:How do Mongolians wait for Godot? When Samuel Beckett's plays are performed around the world, movement conveys meaning in place of language, their director tells Sara Keating.

Attempting to tease out the philosophical puzzles in Samuel Beckett's work somehow seems to make it more impenetrable. As academic buzzwords such as lessness, meaninglessness, phenomenology and existentialism are employed to name Beckett's famous "unnameable", so an extra layer of complexity muddies the mystery of meaning in his prose and plays writing.

Theatre practitioner Sarah Jane Scaife believes in bringing Beckett back to basics. Having spent the Beckett Centenary year introducing Beckett's work to non-Western cultures, Scaife has found a way of transcending language barriers, cultural differences, philosophical incongruities and religious taboos through the performance of his plays. She has achieved this by putting the body back into Beckett; by using the universal gestures of physical movement to convey meaning where language breaks down.

Scaife's project has been the culmination of an interest in Beckett's work that began many years ago. After training in performance arts in New York, Scaife found herself living in Greece.

"I had no Greek and nobody had any English, so was left without a language to express myself in a culture that was very different from my own," she says. "I spent a lot of time watching TV, but the only films I had access to were [the films of] Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Benny Hill - comedians that communicated with slapstick humour through their bodies. Around the same time, I started reading Beckett, and the immersion in physicality and the humour in the plays made me look at ideas of language and communication in a different way."

After that personal experience of cultural difference, Scaife began to perform, direct and teach using Beckett's plays. Highlights of the career that she developed around the performance of Beckett's works included a "mini-festival of Beckett's shorter plays," in 1990, and a stage version of his dense prose-poem, Company, which she re-imagined for performance through the Butoh tradition - a Japanese form of avant-garde dance that she had learned in New York.

"As I was directing and performing the plays, I became really interested in how Beckett managed to create such amazing physical pictures on stage. I started looking at the shorter pieces and their different constituent parts: all the contrasting moments of stillness and movement, light and dark, sound and silence, rhythm and pause. I began to see that what these parts all come down to is the body and the theatre space - not just the body that you see, but the body that you hear and that you experience moving, and the body of the actor in relation to the other bodies in the theatre space."

By looking at the plays in this physical way, Scaife became convinced that Beckett's work, far from the unapproachable intellectual exercise it is often presented as, provided the "ideal way for students to look at acting. No matter how many people I worked with, each performance was always different; because every body is different, every performance would give the play different meaning."

It was an invitation to the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2000, along with directors Mikel Murfi and Michael Caven, that sowed the seeds for Scaife's centennial project.

"I had been worried about approaching the work with [the students in Georgia] from an intellectual perspective. But as soon as we started doing the work, the students immediately took it on that Waiting for Godot was about their lives. It almost worked better in Georgia, where everything was crooked since the revolution, and you had to wait for everything - even electricity, which would only come on once a day. There seemed to be no logic to their existence, beyond these endless queues and waiting, and that's how they understood the whole Beckett thing. The audience loved it."

Scaife met three Mongolians in Georgia, who spoke neither English nor Georgian, but "they asked me to send them a copy [of Beckett's collected works]. When I got back to Ireland I did, and then in 2002, out of the blue, I was invited to the State Theatre in Mongolia. I thought the same thing would happen, that because Mongolia was a communist country that they would relate to the same ideas that the Georgian's did, but [the actors] were just blank. I tried to explain about existentialism, and the metaphor of waiting in Godot as a metaphor for life, and they didn't seem to get it at all. They sat down one day and almost attacked me, asking how Beckett could dare to tell people what to do with these directions.

"They said the play was too long, and it was boring, and that they only wanted to do the part where something happens. So we did the bit with the hats. That started something happening, and eventually we got over the difficulties by doing the play physically, literally breaking it down into the shape. That was the first time Beckett had been translated into Mongolian, and the first time a Beckett piece had been seen in Mongolia. Now Waiting for Godot is on the university curriculum."

After encountering such difficulties, Scaife was inspired to gauge the reaction that Beckett would draw in other non-Western countries. "Would the plays end up being like a Kabuki piece is to someone in the West? Would they think 'Oh, this is exotic, but we don't get it'? I thought the way to find out would be to work with practitioners in other countries and see how they experienced it."

With the help of a bursary from the Department of Foreign Affairs, and grants from the Arts Council and Culture Ireland, Scaife devised an itinerary that included visits to India, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Greece between March and December. Aideen Cosgrove of Pan Pan Theatre accompanied her, recording video footage of the workshops and performances that Scaife undertook with the different theatres, while Scaife made sound recordings which she is currently editing for a documentary for RTÉ radio.

In each country she was faced with a different set of difficulties that made traditional interpretations of Beckett's plays problematic. In India, for example, although Waiting for Godothad been performed since the 1970s, the actors Scaife worked with approached it in a different way than she had seen before.

"They used rubbish dumps as sets, and the part where they swap hats was a 10-minute set-piece of jugglery. In another performance, Estragon stepped out of character in the middle to tell people they were allowed to laugh. Even on a practical level, we couldn't find boots - I mean it's not in the script that the men have specific costumes, but in our tradition we all assume that they do - the bowler hats, the boots."

In Singapore, there was a big debate about the meaning of Waiting for Godot. "Buddhists claimed it from their point of view, arguing that Beckett was saying that life is an illusion that we create from ourselves in order to give meaning to our existence," says Scaife. "Hindus said that Beckett realised the body meant nothing: that life is chaos and death rids us of chaos, and that Vladimir and Estragon were waiting for death. A Christian girl was really moved by it. She understood the play to say that the only thing we have as humans is our faith; that all Estragon and Vladimir have is their hope that something will happen, because otherwise all we are is bones and flesh.

"Greece was amazing too, not only because it brought the whole thing full circle for me. This time I could understand what people were saying - although my Greek isn't great - but even so, it was only when the actors were performing that I realised that the problems we were having were with translation. It is really important when you're translating Beckett that you have practitioners, because it's only by performing that you know that it works.

"One of the things we did in Greece was a Rough for Theatre I", in which one of the players, B, is in a wheelchair. "There was a wheelchair-user who was also a dancer, and he played B. He used the chair in a different way than anything I've ever seen before. He was able to spin it on a penny almost, using the body and chair as if they were one. He punctuated the rhythm of the language with the rhythm of the chair. It was amazing."

Beckett purists might quibble that the cultural differences in interpretation that Scaife discovered are misunderstandings of the real, stable meaning of Beckett's texts, which those rigid stage directions that the Mongolians objected to are said to protect. However, Scaife has found that her own understanding of Beckett's work has been enriched by the "the prism of a different culture. By immersing the work in its physicality, I have found a whole different level of meaning."