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‘Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better’: Adapting Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot for the Chinese Stage – Real and Virtual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2023

WEI ZHANG
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Abstract

From the ‘real’ stage performance in the late 1980s to the ‘virtual’ stage performance in April 2020, when China, after months of being locked down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was gingerly reopening for life again, Chinese theatre artists have persisted in their efforts to adapt the Beckettian play for their sociocultural, artistic and existential needs in the Beckettian spirit of ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’.

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Article
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , July 2023 , pp. 179 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2023

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Footnotes

The author is deeply grateful to Professor Silvija Jestrovic and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and invaluable comments and suggestions for revision. Many thanks also to Wang Chong, director of the 2020 virtual production of Waiting for Godot discussed in this essay. This essay is part of research projects supported by National Social Science Foundation of China Art Studies General Program Funding (No. 20BB023) and by Zhejiang Province Philosophy and Social Science General Program Funding (No. 20NDJC173YB).

References

NOTES

2 Based on figures cited by Chinese media reports, e.g. ‘Yichang xiju ershijiu wan guanzhong: Xianshang xiju Dengdai geduo chengwei yishu shijian’ (One Play, Two Hundred and Ninety Thousand Audiences: Online Waiting for Godot Becoming an Art Event), China Arts and Entertainment Group, 11 April, 2020, at www.caeg.cn/whjtgs/jtdt/202004/9ae3ad40c028411fa9f32c673a2336bb.shtml.

3 The discussion in this essay is limited to adaptation endeavours by theatre artists in mainland China. For such endeavours in Taiwan see Kao, Wei H., ‘Samuel Beckett in Taiwan: Cross-cultural Innovations, Challenges, and Controversies’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 15, 1–2 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006), pp. 160–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Qi, Shouhua, ‘Misreading Ibsen: Chinese Noras On and Off the Stage, and Nora in Her Chinese Husband's Ancestral Land of the 1930s – as Reimagined for the Present-Day Stage’, Comparative Drama, 50, 4 (Winter 2016), pp. 341–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Eide, Elisabeth, China's Ibsen: From Ibsen to Ibsenism (London: Curzon Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

5 Zhang, Wei, Chinese Adaptations of Brecht: Appropriation and Intertextuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Lin, Lidan and Zhang, Helong, ‘The Chinese Response to Samuel Beckett (1906–89)’, Irish Studies Review, 19, 4 (November 2011), pp. 414–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lie, Jianxi and Ingham, Mike, ‘The Reception of Samuel Beckett in China’, in Nixon, Mark and Feldman, Matthew, eds., The International Reception of Samuel Beckett (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 129–46Google Scholar.

7 Beckett, Samuel, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 89Google Scholar.

8 Palmer, Richard H., Tragedy and Tragic Theory (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), p. 61Google Scholar.

9 Tatlow, Antony, ‘Samuel Brecht and Bertolt Beckett: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as Educators’, in McMullan, Anna and Wilmer, S. E., eds., Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), pp. 82–114Google Scholar, here p. 108.

10 Moorjani, Angela, Beckett and Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lin, Lidan, ‘Samuel Beckett's Encounter with the East’, English Studies, 91, 6 (2010), pp. 623–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Kubiak, Aubrey D., ‘Godot: The Non-negative Nothingness’, Romance Notes, 48, 3 (2008), pp. 395–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Ranjan Ghosh, ‘Reconfiguring Waiting for Godot: Explorations within Some Paradigms of Hindu Philosophy’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 14, After Beckett/D'après Beckett (2004), pp. 307–21, here p. 308.

13 Xuan Lei, ‘Zhongguo chuantong xiju shijian wenti yanjiu huigu’ (Reviewing the Time Problem in Chinese Traditional Drama Research), Qingnian Wenxuejia (Youth Literator), 5 (2009), pp. 38–52.

14 See Li Yu, Casual Expressions of Idle Feelings, trans. Faye C. Fei. and William H. Sun, in Daniel Gerould, ed., Theatre, Theory, Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel (New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2000), pp. 179–88; and Du Shuying, Lun Li Yu de xiju meixue (On Li Yu's Theories of Drama) (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1982).

15 Mark Taylor-Batty and Juliette Taylor-Batty, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). See also Magda Romanska, ed., The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 444.

16 For a summary of the characteristics of traditional Chinese xiju, e.g. the interfusion of arts, symbolic representation and stylization, see Shouhua Qi, Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. ix–vii.

17 See ‘Lin Chong Ye Ben’, at https://baike.baidu.com/item/林冲夜奔/62230, a popular jingju (originally a kunqu).

18 See ‘Water Margin’, at www.britannica.com/topic/Water-Margin.

19 See Chen Shixiong, Sanjiao duihua: Sitanni, Bulaixite he Zhongguo xiju (Triangle Dialogues: Stanislavsky, Brecht and Chinese Drama) (Xiamen: Xiamen University Press, 2003).

20 Kristin Morrison, ‘Biblical Allusions in Waiting for Godot’, in William Hutchings, ed., Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), pp. 56–63; and Alyce Elizabeth Bush Strickland, Biblical Allusions in Waiting for Godot (Monroe: Northeast Louisiana University Press, 1987).

21 See Nixon and Feldman, The International Reception of Samuel Beckett; and Brater, Enoch, ‘The Globalization of Beckett's Godot’, Comparative Drama, 37, 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 145–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 As Emilie Morin demonstrates with an abundance of evidence, Beckett remained sociopolitically engaged throughout his career. Emilie Morin, Beckett's Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See also Anita Rákóczy, ‘The Godots That Arrived in Hungary’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 29, 2, Staging Beckett at the Margins/Autres scènes beckettiennes (2017), pp. 283–97; Susan Sontag, ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo’, Performing Arts Journal, 16, 2 (May 1994), pp. 87–106; Lance Duerfahrd, ‘Precarious Theatre: Staging Waiting for Godot at the Occupy Wall Street Protest’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 29, 2, Staging Beckett at the Margins/Autres scènes beckettiennes (2017), pp. 350–60; Duerfahrd, The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett's Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013); and Arthur Rose, ‘Beckett in New Orleans: Communities and Commodities’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 29, 2, Staging Beckett at the Margins/Autres scènes beckettiennes (2017), pp. 337–49.

23 See Priyanka Chatterjee, ‘Staging Beckett in Bengal’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 29, 2, Staging Beckett at the Margins/Autres scènes beckettiennes (2017), pp. 403–13; Rina Kim, ‘Young-woong Lim's Waiting for Godot’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 29, 2, Staging Beckett at the Margins/Autres scènes beckettiennes (2017), pp. 388–402; and de Camargo, Robson Corrêa and Rehder, Ernest, ‘Finding Godot: Samuel Beckett, Fifty Years in the Brazilian Theater’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 15, 1–2 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006), pp. 124–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 In 1986, students at Shanghai Theatre Academy staged a production of Waiting for Godot. See Irving Lo, ‘Waiting for Godot in the People's Republic of China’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 11–12, special double issue (1989), pp. 236–9.

25 See ‘Meng Jinghui’ at https://baike.baidu.com/item/孟京辉; and Claire Conceison, ‘China's Experimental Mainstream: The Badass Theatre of Meng Jinghui’, TDR, 58, 1, Performing Shanghai and Beyond: Special Consortium Issue (Spring 2014), pp. 64–88.

26 Qi, Adapting Western Classics, pp. 28–9.

27 Rossella Ferrari, ‘Beckett's Chinese Progeny: Absurdity, Waiting, and the Godot Motif in Contemporary China’, in Marc Maufort and Dorothy Figueira, eds., Theatres in the Round: Multi-ethnic, Indigenous, and Intertextual Dialogues in Drama (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 133–60, here p. 137.

28 For events that happened in 1989 see ‘Tiananmen Square Incident’, at www.britannica.com/event/Tiananmen-Square-incident.

29 See ‘What you know and don't know about Meng Jinghui’ (你所知道和不知道的孟京辉), 29 September 2017, at https://m.sohu.com/a/195506016_99913641/?pvid=000115_3w_a.

30 Meng Jinghui, ed., ‘Wa shiyan jutuan zhi guanzhong’ (To Theatre-Goers from Frog Experimental Theatre), Xianfeng xiju dangan (Avant-Garde Theatre Archives) (Zuojia chubanshe (Writers Press), 2011), pp. 46–7.

31 This discussion of the 1991 production is based on the performance video available at www.bilibili.com/video/av65213450.

32 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove Press, 1982), pp. 42–3.

33 Ibid., p. 55.

34 For comparison with the original play see ibid., pp. 41–2.

35 Ibid., p. 2, emphasis added.

36 Meng Jinghui, ‘Wa shiyan jutuan zhi guanzhong’.

37 See ‘Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour’, at www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780190622671.001.0001/acref-9780190622671-e-171.

38 This portion of the discussion is based on Ren Ming, Ren Ming xiao juchang xiju ji (A Collection of Ren Ming's Little Theatre Productions), DVD (Beijing: Beijing People's Art Theatre, 2011).

39 See Linda Ben-Zvi, ed., Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. x.

40 Sontag, ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo’, pp. 91–4.

41 See Silvija Jestrovic, ‘Waiting for Godot: Sarajevo and Its Interpretations’, in Jestrovic, Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 115–28, here p. 115.

42 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 16–17. The relationship between Vladimir and Estragon has been perceived by some as homosexual. See B. Chandrika, The Private Garden: The Family in Post-war British Drama (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1993), pp. 129–30; and Peter Boxall, ‘Beckett and Homoeroticism’, in Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 110–32.

43 Xiuyu, Liu, ‘Beikete xiju de Zhongguo jieshou’ (The Chinese Reception of Beckett's Plays), Wenyi zhengming (Debate in Arts and Literature), 7 (2013), pp. 142–4Google Scholar, here p. 143.

44 Wu Wenguang, ‘San jiemei he Dengdai geduo: Cong yuedu dao wutai’ (Three Sisters Waiting for Godot: From Reading to Stage), at www.douban.com/note/157801276.

45 Quoted in Vista Kan Tianxia, ‘Ershi nian hou guanzhong kandong le San jiemei Dengdai geduo le ma?’ (The Audiences now Understand Three Sisters Waiting for Godot Twenty Years Afterwards?), at http://kuaibao.qq.com/s/20181002A1598W00?refer=spider. See also Feng Jing, ‘San jiemei Dengdai geduo: Yichang daxing jiti huaijiu’ (Three Sisters Waiting for Godot: A Big Collective Nostalgia), Beijing qingnian bao (Beijing Youth Paper), 19 October 2018, at http://wap.art.ifeng.com/?app=system&controller=artmobile&action=content&contentid=3449898.

46 See Rose, Arthur and Chan, Paul, ‘Next Day, Same Place: After Godot in New Orleans’, TDR, 52, 4 (Winter 2008), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

47 See Waiting for Godot in Fukushima, staged by Kamome Machine, 10 August 2011, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeEPEUIRp14. See also Julie Hudson, ‘The Environment on Stage: Scenery or Shapeshifter?’, PhD thesis (University of Warwick, Australia, 2017), pp. 177–8.

48 ‘Coronavirus: Wuhan Begins to Return to Everyday Life’, BBC, 3 April 2020, at www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52153103.

49 ‘Dengdai geduo: Daoyan youhua shuo’ (Waiting for Godot: The Director Has Something to Say), at https://v.qq.com/x/cover/mzc00200qz4dro0/c00334v6w9g.html.

50 ‘You yisi de ren: Wang Chong’ (Artist as Thinker: Wang Chong), at https://v.qq.com/x/cover/mzc00200snid944/m0033vzl2b0.html.

51 The dialogues between Fufu and Ganggang and all the quotes hereafter are based on the performance videos available at https://v.qq.com/detail/m/mzc00200qz4dro0.html. For comparison with the original play see Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 2–3, 68.

52 See Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 67.

53 Ibid., pp. 45–7.

54 Ibid., pp. 87–103.

55 See ‘Shuanghuanglian koufu ye’, at https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/双黄连口服液双黄连口服液.

56 See ‘Shanghai yaowu suo’ (Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica), China News, at https://m.chinanews.com/wap/detail/zw/sh/2020/02-02/9075719.shtml.

57 Based on figures reported by Chinese media.

58 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 103.

59 See ‘Huanghelou’, at https://baike.baidu.com/item/黄鹤楼/62298; and ‘Yellow Crane Tower’, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Crane_Tower.

60 See Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 109.

61 ‘Yichang xiju ershijiu wan guanzhong’ (One Theatrical Performance with 290,000 Audiences), at www.caeg.cn/whjtgs/jtdt/202004/9ae3ad40c028411fa9f32c673a2336bb.shtml.

62 ‘Dengdai geduo de duanping’ (Waiting for Godot Short Comments), at www.douban.com/location/drama/35016214/comments.

63 Tool, David, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse (New York: Basic Books, 1998)Google Scholar.

64 Moody, Alys, ‘Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: Modernist Autonomy and Transnational Performance in Paul Chan's Beckett’, Theatre Journal, 65, 4, Modernism (December 2013), pp. 537–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Da Yu, ‘Ping Wang Chong dao Dengdai geduo’ (On Waiting for Godot directed by Wang Chong), at www.sohu.com/a/387267255_100004574; and Xing Jianjun, ‘Cong wangluo biaoyan dao xuni juchang’ (From Online Performance to Virtual Theatre), at www.sohu.com/a/386447314_791794.

66 Bei Xiaojing, ‘Dengdai geduo: Yibenzhengjing de pingyong qilai’ (Waiting for Godot: To Be Earnestly Mediocre), at www.weibo.com/u/2641162085?refer_flag=1005055013_&is_all=1#_rnd1590187659811.