LAVINIA ZAINEA

Watching Beckett

     The Theater Festival provided me with the opportunity of discovering Beckett in a new language, Portuguese. The play was actually a collage of four plays, and their impact was different upon the audience. The artistic direction for the fourth one, for instance, entailed that just the mouth of one of the actresses was visible on the stage, while the rest of her was obscured. The monologue went on for approximately forty minutes, and it wasn’t one of the most compelling. What was already a challenging experience was made harder by the fact that the subtitles were made to match the English version of the play, while the Portuguese version was more of an adaptation. The few times I cast my eyes on the translation, I felt like I had stepped into another script, and my mind invariably wandered to what the English version might have sounded like.
      It brought back memories of other Beckett adaptations I had seen, most notably one made by some of my high school colleagues on All That Fall. That was my first contact with the playwright’s text, before reading Waiting for Godot. I remember sitting in the high school’s conference hall, where various groups presented their versions of various scripts, most of them variations on Caragiale’s texts, played out for laughs. The acting skills were those of sixteen-year-olds who studied math and sciences, and most of us were there to enjoy the atmosphere and socialize, rather than pay attention to the play. I remember paying attention to the costumes more than to the actual lines, busy spotting people I knew or wanted to know. But I remember walking out of there with the impression that I would never be able to understand Beckett unless I read him. Nor enjoy him..