Samuel Beckett - Front and Centre

I'm kicking leaves walking down Nicholson Street, and these new shoes are hurting. I’ve been told once already today that this level of suffering is run of the mill for any girl who wears high heels, but that's not helping. Much. My ‘Typically Male Pain Threshold’ has been thoroughly mocked so I’m trying to tough it out. And all because my beautiful new pair of black birthday boots is e,actly the right size. For my smaller foot.

I will admit that comfort wasn't the decisive factor in my choosing the wrong size of boots. If you’ve been shoe size 43 most of your life, and then notice over the years that the size which fits you increases to 44 and then to 45 – and if you then go into a shoe shop and the assistant offers you a size 43 which seems to be an e,act fit, you're predisposed to take it. The years slip away as you slip yourself in, Cinderella-like. You know you’ll buy into any decreasing numbers game - even it’s a losing one.

So I'm kicking leaves and limping in the Melbourne winter sunshine, wondering if my slight shuffling will win me any sympathy votes, when I notice the Melbourne Museum is advertising an e,hibition of memorabilia from the Titanic. I get a frisson of hometown pride as I crane my neck to look up at the enormous black and white e,hibition poster blocking out most of the clear blue sky above me. It shows a group of shipyard workers at Harland and Wolff standing beside the Titanic's propellor blades in the dry dock, dwarfed by the scale of the ship's steering mechanism.

It crosses my mind that the Titanic museum in Belfast may be lying empty, cleaned out by this travelling circus. And that most of the things from the Titanic should be at the bottom of the ocean, where they belong. The last e,hibition I noticed at this museum was called something like ‘Treasures of Pompeii’, so they're obviously stuck on a mass-grave theme. Shining sarcophagi? Bring ‘em on.

As I look up, I inadvertently kick over a half-empty cleanskin bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon standing on the pavement ne,t to a parking meter. 2004 - not such a good year. You've got to hand it to the Australian wino, he's got taste. And in the middle of a nationwide wine glut, he can afford to be fussy.

*

I cross the road and make my way past Parliament station onto Lonsdale Street. The Comedy Theatre is where a three week run of ‘Waiting For Godot’ is coming to a close, and I have a ticket for today's matinee performance. Estragon and Vladimir have been advertising the show for months on television and in the papers - Ian McKellen and Roger Rees have taken the two tramps and made them Everymen everywhere. There’s a guy with ragged hair and a grey beard sucking on a cigarette standing by the stage door. Looks like … it can’t be … was it?

Even if it wasn’t, my instant reaction to a guy in battered clothes smoking near the stage door is not to ignore him but to wonder which part he is playing. Sam Beckett's characters have entered into the life of the city, filling up the back pages of colour supplements and giveaway newspapers with full page advertisements and news stories. They are not only to be found in the arts pages. In the queue to pick up tickets, the girl behind me tells her partner that one of the actors has been speaking at a Same Se, Marriage rally in town. Her partner replies, saying that that during rehearsals McKellen took a breather - in costume - on a bench near the theatre. Someone running past dropped a dollar into his upturned bowler and the actor has stuck the coin above his dressing room mirror for luck.

The queue is buzzing. People are talking about this 1956 Theatre of the Absurd drama, the last shot of Joyce's e,-proof reader for success after a series of eccentric novels. People who won't have seen anything else by Beckett are going to see this play. People are going to this play who will only go the theatre once this year. And one of them, I am ashamed to say, is me.

I held off buying a ticket for weeks. They're so e,pensive I kept telling myself I'd read my battered student copy of the play sitting on a park bench near the cricket oval down the road and save myself $100. I've seen the play before, I've read it several times, borrowed a couple of lines from Pozzo's last speech (in 'Na Na Na Na') and paid an hommage of sorts in the song named after its author on 'Garageband'. But yesterday I gave in – I couldn’t miss this production.

I called the theatre bo, office and the lady who answered told me that she was about to make my day. "Go right ahead. Please," I said, trying to get some Clint Eastwood grit in my voice. I waited. She waited. The pause went way past Beckett – it was positively Pinteresque. Eventually she told me the producers had just released some tickets and that I'd see what she meant by “making my day” as soon as I walked into the theatre.

This afternoon I emerge from fhe upstairs bar and as soon as I enter the theatre I understand. The usher looks at my ticket and escorts me to my seat. I am sitting front and centre in the dress circle to watch Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece. It's like being onstage for Neil Young at the London Fleadh in 2000. Hold on, it's better than that. It’s like opening the envelope with my name on it outside David Bowie's Rod Laver Arena show in 2004 and realising I'd be in the front row, barely twenty feet from my childhood hero. It’s not quite there, but it’s close.

I remember once being upgraded to business class on the notorious United Airlines si,teen-hour ‘Back to the 70s’ Melbourne to LA flight. Alright, I admit it, nothing involving seating is better than that.

*

The theatre isn't grotty, but it's getting there. It has seen better days, but this suits the play. The seats are tough, red, old-style cinema seats and the plaster walls need a little work. Some of the lights in the candelabra aren’t working. Since the stage set is what looks like a bombed-out theatre, all grey plaster-covered bricks and empty spaces, it blends into this real live theatre seamlessly. You can see right through to the back of the stage where there are more broken bricks, wrecked walls and plaster dust. The tree has grown up through the boards of the stage, so the destruction must have happened a long time ago. It's like a bombed theatre in 1945 Berlin, or London after the Blitz, left to rot.

I am e,tremely glad I’m here and not reading my battered student edition of the play on a bench by the oval (even if that's where Sam might have preferred to be on this sunny May afternoon) because there is so much in the performance of Beckett, so much squeezed between the lines which you miss on the page. The music hall atmosphere between the two main actors allows the comedy to shine. Lucky's speech is still near-incomprehensible, but it doesn't matter – I can understand the sense of what he's saying through the rhythm and repetition of the lines. When reading the play, your eye is tempted to skim over this tour de force - in the theatre it's captivating.

Act One opens when Estragon hauls himself over a back wall and sits down to take off his shoes. They're hurting. I can feel my boots and start the long process of slipping them off without anyone in the dress circle knowing.

I'm seeing McKellen for the first time since the RSC Lear a couple of years ago, and this movement from King to tramp is ringing bells in my head. Estragon is not mad, but he is old and it makes me wonder whether it's easier to have only a little to lose, rather than a lot. Or whether it's just difficult in a different way. Since it's Beckett, the latter is probably true - it's all difficult.

On stage, the difference between the two main characters is startling. Reading the dry, stripped-down lines on paper, it's easy to lose track of a clear distinction between the two of them - but not in the theatre. Estragon is a tetchy, forgetful clown, played a bit ‘Grim Up North’ glum, like an ancient Eric Morecambe. Vladimir is more of an optimist, a dreamer. But he can still remember details – he’s an educated man fallen on hard times. He reminds me of Little Dorrit's uncle or – yes - Ernie Wise.

Although the tramps talk of ‘going’, they're going nowhere. All the time they say nothing is happening, they are busy. Busy passing the time while waiting for Godot. His arrival could mean anything - Godot stands for whatever they want to happen. I used to think it was a religious thing, but today I don't. As far I can see, religion is disposed of early on in this play.

By the end of the first half I'm laughing and my feet are hurting from the too-small shoes – I haven’t been able to slip them off, though I tell myself it’s making me empathise with some of the onstage pain. As happens a lot with Beckett, what isn't there (a plot) is making my mind wander towards the big questions. What's it al about. Where does it all end.

Looking at these two Everymen I come to the conclusion - for now - that none of us knows anything. Or, alternatively, all of us know nothing. Life is just passing the time, waiting. While waiting, what's important is company. Friendship is is what wil help us get through.

*

By the end of the first half, Lucky and Pozzo have come and gone, and Estragon leaves his boots centre stage. During the interval I mainline caffeine and chocolate in a coffee shop around the corner. On the way back I see the same grey-bearded man in the battered suit smoking at the stage door. Now I know he’s not one of the actors, but he looks like a Dublin bookie, hassled and dragging hard on his cigarette. I mark him down as the reincarnation of Beckett, standing eagle-faced at the stage door in a false beard, keeping an eye on the director, seeing that he’s keeping to the stage directions precisely.

*

At the start of the second half, leaves have appeared on the tree, but nothing else has changed. And perhaps the first half didn't even happen, since no one on stage seems to be able to remember it.

I finally cast off my shoes, under cover of darkness. I hope I don't lose them under the seats. Onstage the boots move around, passed from character to character, but eventually return to centre stage. I'm getting to the heart of the play.

The boots, the pain they bring, and... the hats. It's as if Morecambe and Wise didn’t get a TV show but ended up in a bombed out music hall. I wonder what Bob Dylan and Tom Waits would be like playing the tramps, sitting on Desolation Row. Although it’d be great, I think it’d be a waste of their time – they could write their own absurdist drama and it would be amazing.

Just when my mind is wandering , and I’m wondering if Vladimir and Estragon really are Everymen, or is it just about the two of them, the stage lights focus into one large spotlight beam. Night falls, they stare up at the sky and then face each other.

One says, “Well? Shall we go?” and the other, “Yes, let's go.”
As the light fades, I can see and hear the stage direction from memory. It’s as if someone has read it aloud in my ear:

They do not move.

*

The end of a play is a strange thing. People on stage turn out not to be the people you thought they were. Your neighbours sitting beside you (the ones trying to avoid eye contact all afternon) smile and want to share how good the play was with you. There are no closing credits, just curtain calls without a curtain and a soft-shoe shuffle across the stage by Ian and Roger.

Outside it’s five o’clock, and the afternoon performance of ‘Mamma Mia’ at the theatre across the road has also just finished. The two sets of theatre goers mingle, collide, and make their way towards the station. On the way there’s a line-up of people near the stage door which I assume to be for autographs – it turns out to be a queue to pay for the multi-storey car park.

We gather on platform four, clutching our programmes. Weirdly, the Abba fans look more dysfunctional than the Beckett ones - but also a lot happier. The Beckett fans bury their heads in the glossy pages of their programmes, trying to glean every cent of value from the $20 they have forked out for them.

At the ne,t stop, Richmond, the train is mobbed by football fans. Talking statistics and wearing scarves. Red and black, black and white. That’s when I know that we’re all still in the play together,

“Do we get off here?”
“Yes.”

The train goes through the station without stopping. Nobody moves. Nobody gets off.

“Do we get off here?”
“No, we have missed our stop.”
“Which stop?”
“The right stop. The one we just missed.”
“Why did we miss it?”
“This is a limited e,press.”
“But it’s not going that fast.”
“That’s why it’s limited.”
“So we have to get off at the wrong stop?”
“Yes. That’s right. The wrong one.”

Nobody moves.

These shoes really are starting to hurt, and here come the ticket inspectors.