We are creatures of desire and, unlike the need of a hungry person for food, desire cannot be satisfied. Nor, unlike an infant’s demand for love, can it be assuaged and appeased.
Review by Sean Sheehan
Photos by Photo Marc Brenner
We are all, in one way or another, completists – always choosing shoes of the same colour, always possessed by some silly fetish that makes no apparent sense. The psychoanalyst Lacan called what we desire the objet petit a. Why are two tramps waiting around under a tree in ‘Waiting for Godot? They are faithfully waiting for the objet petit a. What we desire is not only an object but also, paradoxically, the cause of desire. The object of desire engenders a zone for desire to express itself as part of a human need to fill the foundational gap in being, the out-of-jointness that makes reality incomplete and inconsistent.
The only thing one can be guilty of, said Lacan, is having given ground relative to one’s desire. Given that every object of desire cannot deliver the fullness of being that we crave, it would be a betrayal to rest content with substitutes, trompe-l’œils. We must remain faithful to our desire because to do anything else would be a compromise and an ethical infidelity.
Desire is not giving up and so we wait, recognising how the act of living is an obligation that must be sustained despite its catastrophic nullity. Desire desires wholeness, oneness, but the incoherence of the primal void makes this impossible. Reality has no stable grammar and so desire haunts language. It can be heard in the conversations of Vladimir and Estragon. Their objet petit a is the waiting and at some level they know Godot is also waiting.
In the meantime, they go on living and face the injustice that surrounds them. Estragon, speaking for every innocent victim of the cruelty of others, tells how he was beaten up and doesn’t know why. Vladimir tells him that what matters is how one goes on living: “…it’s the way of doing it that counts, the way of doing it, if you want to go on living”.
When the Nazis invaded Paris, where Beckett was living at the time, he joined a Resistance cell and barely escaped with his life when the group was betrayed.
Years later, he made donations to the African National Congress to help fight apartheid in South Africa. Reducing Beckett’s work to existential angst is bourgeois comfort culture and ignores the Pozzo and Lucky scenes in “Waiting for Godot”. Vladimir asks: “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?”
The intellectualism of the drama comes across strongly in the production at Theatre Royal Haymarket with its focus on the diction and the unswerving honesty and insight of the playwright.
“Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett is at Theatre Royal Haymarket. Tickets at £25 or less are available, including ones held back for under 30s and blue light workers; see website for details.
(Photos provided by Theatre Royal Haymarket)
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