To Wait, or Not to Wait?
By Dr. Cheung Ping-kuen, MH
Waiting – this action is anything but foreign to us. We wait for buses, ferries, friends, food delivery; we wait for paycheques, for test results, for hospital reports… How much of our life have we actually spent waiting? If nothing in this world required waiting, would time suddenly become more abundant, more usable? Would our lifespan magically stretch a little longer?
Yet, society has its own inexorable rhythms. Living among others, waiting seems an inescapable part of the human contract.
Waiting can carry the thrill of anticipation, or it can come laced with anxiety. When we buy tickets to Waiting for Godot and count down to curtain-up, there is a flutter of excitement; when we wait for our first love to show up for a date, or for news of whether we got the job, our hearts inevitably pace up and down. Waiting gives birth to every shade of emotion, and its meaning is only revealed by whatever – or whoever – finally arrives.
The bus comes, and off we go; the friend arrives, and together we eat, laugh, make memories; the beloved (at long last) appears, and hand in hand we compose the sweet music of shared life. Waiting is truly a verb that accompanies us from cradle to grave. It can be dull and soul-draining, or it can be vivid and fulfilling. We look back on waiting for love as honeyed memory; some philosophers even claim that waiting for death is preparing to receive a gift. Did I hear that right? Derrida argued that precisely because this “gift” belongs only to me and I can never repay it, life is confronted with its purest and most tremendous responsibility.
But is there such a thing as waiting without end? When we wait and wait and nothing seems to come – what then? To wait, or not to wait? To keep waiting even when we know, deep down, that the outcome is almost certainly nothing – is that foolishness, helplessness, or a strange kind of courage that refuses to give up? The work that has thought most deeply about waiting, turned it into art, and earned universal reverence for doing so, is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (written in 1948; completed in 1949; Paris premiere in 1953). With devastating precision it captures the postwar European condition: peace restored, yet the future shrouded in bewilderment. Its spare, intensely symbolic characters and relationships strike directly at our own experiences of futile waiting while simultaneously flinging open an immense space for imagination.
Over the past seven decades, Godot has been staged countless times worldwide. Among the landmark productions, one must mention the version directed by Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In August 1955, at the age of just 25, he brought the play to London – a pivotal moment that carried Beckett’s work beyond France and into international recognition. Another legendary staging was Susan Sontag’s 1993 production in besieged Sarajevo: with the former Yugoslavia torn apart by brutal civil war and the city under siege for nearly 1,400 days, the citizens of Sarajevo became perhaps the most “perfect” audience Godot has ever had.
Hong Kong too has seen several theatre companies tackle this masterpiece over the years.
Now, Tang Shu-wing – one who chooses his repertoire with extraordinary care and never stages a work lightly – is bringing us his Waiting for Godot. What kind of landscape will he unveil?