The New York Review Abroad (43 page)

I concluded that I could not do all of
Waiting for Godot
. But the very choices I had made about the staging which made Act I as long as it was also meant that the staging could represent the whole of
Waiting for Godot
, while using only the words of Act I. For this may be the only work in dramatic literature in which Act I is itself a complete play. The place and time of Act I are: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” (For Act II: “Next day. Same time. Same place.”) Although the time is “Evening,” both acts show a complete day, the day beginning with Vladimir and Estragon meeting again (though in every sense except the sexual one a couple, they separate each evening), and with Vladimir (the dominant one, the reasoner and information-gatherer, who is better at fending off despair) inquiring where Estragon has spent the night. They talk about waiting for Godot (whoever he may be), straining to pass the time. Pozzo and Lucky arrive, stay for a while and perform their “routines,” for which Vladimir and Estragon are the audience, then depart. After this there is a time of deflation and relief: they are waiting again. Then the messenger arrives to tell them that they have waited once more in vain.

Of course, there is a difference between Act I and the replay of Act I which is Act II. Not only has one more day gone by. Everything is worse. Lucky no longer can speak, Pozzo is now pathetic and blind, Vladimir has given in to despair. Perhaps I felt that the despair of Act I was enough for the Sarajevo audience, and that I wanted to spare them a second time when Godot does not arrive. Maybe I wanted to propose, subliminally, that Act II might be different. For, precisely as
Waiting for Godot
was so apt an illustration of the feelings of Sarajevans now—bereft, hungry, dejected, waiting for an arbitrary, alien power to save them or take them under its protection—it seemed apt, too, to be staging
Waiting for Godot, Act I
.

4.

People in Sarajevo live harrowing lives; this was a harrowing
Godot
. Ines was flamboyantly theatrical as Pozzo, and Atko was the most heart-rending Lucky I have ever seen. Atko, who had ballet training and was a movement teacher at the Academy, quickly mastered the postures and gestures of decrepitude, and responded inventively to my suggestions for Lucky’s dance of freedom. It took longer to work out Lucky’s monologue—which in every other production of
Godot
I’d seen (including the one Beckett himself directed in 1975 at the Schiller Theater in Berlin) was, to my taste, delivered too fast, as nonsense. I divided this speech into five parts, and we discussed it line by line, as an argument, as a series of images and sounds, as a lament, as a cry. I wanted Atko to deliver Beckett’s aria about divine apathy and indifference, about a heartless, petrifying world, as if it made perfect sense. Which it does, especially in Sarajevo.

It has always seemed to me that
Waiting for Godot
is a supremely realistic play, though it is generally acted in something like a minimalist, or vaudeville, style. The
Godot
that the Sarajevo actors were by inclination, temperament, previous theater experience, and present (atrocious) circumstances most able to perform, and the one I chose as a director, was full of anguish, of immense sadness, and toward the end, violence. That the messenger is a strapping adult meant that when he announces the bad news Vladimir and Estragon could express not only disappointment but rage: manhandling him as they could never have done were the role played by a small child. (And there are six, not two, of them, and only one of him.) After he escapes, they subside into a long, terrible silence. It was a Chekhovian moment of absolute pathos, as at the end of
The Cherry Orchard
, when the ancient butler Firs wakes up to find that he’s been left behind in the abandoned house.

During the production of
Godot
and this second stay in Sarajevo it felt as if I were going through the replay of a familiar cycle. Some of the severest shelling of the central city since the beginning of the siege took place during the first ten days I was there. On one day Sarajevo was hit by nearly 4,000 shells. Once more hopes were raised of American intervention, but Clinton was outwitted (if that is not too strong a term to describe so weak a resolve) by the pro-Serb UNPRO-FOR command, which claimed that intervention would endanger UN troops. The despair and disbelief of the Sarajevans steadily mounted. A mock cease-fire was called, which meant just a little shelling and sniping, but since more people ventured out in the street, almost as many were murdered and maimed each day.

The cast and I tried to avoid jokes about “waiting for Clinton” but that was very much what we were doing in late July, when the Serbs took, or seemed to take, Mt. Igman, just above the airport. The capture of Mt. Igman would allow them to fire shells horizontally into the central city, and hope rose again that there would be American airstrikes against the Serb gun positions, or at least a lifting of the arms embargo. Although people were afraid to hope, for fear of being disappointed, at the same time no one could believe that Clinton would again speak of intervention and again do nothing. I myself had succumbed to hope again when a journalist friend showed me a dim satellite fax transmission of Senator Biden’s superb speech in favor of intervention, twelve single-spaced pages, which he had delivered on the floor of the Senate on July 29. The Holiday Inn, the only functioning hotel in Sarajevo, which is on the western side of the central city, four blocks from the nearest Serb snipers, was crowded with journalists waiting for the fall of Sarajevo or the intervention; one of the hotel staff said the place hadn’t been this full since the 1984 Winter Olympics.

Sometimes I thought we were not waiting for Godot, or Clinton. We were waiting for our props. There seemed no way to find Lucky’s suitcase and picnic basket, Pozzo’s cigarette holder (to substitute for the pipe) and whip. As for the carrot that Estragon munches slowly, rapturously: until two days before we opened, we had to rehearse with three of the dry rolls I scavenged each morning from the Holiday Inn dining room (rolls were the breakfast offered) to feed the actors and assistants, and the all-too-rare stagehand. We could not find any rope for Pozzo until a week after we started on the stage, and Ines got understandably cranky when, after three weeks of rehearsal, she still did not have the right length of rope, a proper whip, a cigarette holder, an atomizer. The bowler hats and the boots for the Estragons materialized only in the last days of rehearsal. And the costumes—whose designs I had suggested and the sketches of which I had approved in the first week—did not come until the day before we opened.

Some of this was owing to the scarcity of virtually everything in Sarajevo. Some of it, I had to conclude, was typically “southern” (or Balkan) mañana-ism. (“You’ll definitely have the cigarette holder tomorrow,” I was told every morning for three weeks.) But some of the shortages were the result of rivalry between theaters. There had to be props at the closed National Theater. Why were they not available to us? I discovered, shortly before the opening, that I was not just a visiting member of the Sarajevo “theater world,” but that there were several theater tribes in Sarajevo and that, being allied with Haris Pasovic’s, I could not count on the good will of the others. (It would work the other way around, too. On one occasion, when precious help was offered me by another producer, who on my last visit had become a friend, I was told by Pasovic, who was otherwise reasonable and helpful: “I don’t want you to take anything from that person.”)

Of course this would be normal behavior anywhere else. Why not in besieged Sarajevo? Theater in prewar Sarajevo must have had the same feuds, pettiness, and jealousy as in any other European city. I think my assistants, as well as Ognjenka Finci, the set and costume designer, and Pasovic himself were anxious to shield me from the knowledge that not everybody in Sarajevo was to be trusted. When I began to catch on that some of our difficulties reflected a degree of hostility or even sabotage, one of my assistants said to me sadly: “Now that you know us, you won’t want to come back any more.”

Sarajevo is not only a city that represents an ideal of pluralism; it was regarded by many of its citizens as an ideal place: though not important (because not big enough, not rich enough), it was still the best place to be, even if, being ambitious, you had to leave it to make a real career, as people from San Francisco eventually go to Los Angeles or New York. “You can’t imagine what it used to be like here,” Pasovic said to me. “It was paradise.” That kind of idealization produces a very acute disillusionment, so that now almost all the people I know in Sarajevo cannot stop lamenting the city’s moral deterioration: the increasing number of muggings and thefts, the gangsterism, the predatory black marketeers, the banditry of some army units, the absence of civic cooperation. One would think that they could forgive themselves, and their city. For seventeen months it has been a shooting gallery. There is virtually no municipal government; hence, debris from shelling doesn’t get picked up, schooling isn’t organized for small children, etc., etc. A city under siege must, sooner or later, become a city of rackets.

But most Sarajevans are pitiless in their condemnation of conditions now, and of many “elements,” as they would call them with pained vagueness, in the city. “Anything good that happens here is a miracle,” one of my friends said to me. And another: “This is a city
of bad people.” When an English photojournalist made us the invaluable gift of nine candles, three were immediately stolen. One day Mirza’s lunch—a chunk of homebaked bread and a pear—was taken from his knapsack while he was on the stage. It could not have been one of the other actors. But it could have been anyone else, say, one of the stagehands or any of the students from the Academy of Drama who wandered in and out of the rehearsals. The discovery of this theft was very depressing to the actors.

Yet although a lot of people want to leave, and will leave when they can, a surprising number say that their lives are not unbearable. “We can live this life forever,” said one of my friends from my April visit, Hrvoje Batinic, a local journalist. “I can live this life a hundred years,” a new friend, Zehra Kreho—the dramaturge of the National Theater—said to me one evening. Both are in their late thirties.