A Japanese sequel to Beckett’s classic play

Minoru Betsuyaku’s play, Godot Has Come, will be performed in Japanese (with English subtitles) at UCC’s Granary Theatre .

What would happen if Godot, the mysterious unseen character in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, actually turned up? That premise is at the heart of Japanese playwright, Minoru Betsuyaku’s play, Godot Has Come. It will be performed in Japanese (with subtitles) at UCC’s Granary Theatre from February 19-20.

The play, written as an homage to Beckett, premiered in Tokyo in 2007 and according to its director, K Kiyama: “It had an extraordinary impact on the Japanese theatre world.” It reflects Japanese society which has moved from being family and community based to individualistic and somewhat controlled by technology.

Betsuyaku is a leading playwright in Japan, and established the Theatre of the Absurd there. He says that with the death of community in his country “these days, individuals are being thrown out and scattered. We need to remake new personal relationships. Compared to the old days, there are more people who don’t care about family and the local community. People tend to move around rather than staying in one place. Therefore, they don’t make strong relationships with each other.”

In Godot Has Come, the characters don’t care about his arrival. “They act as if they were not waiting for him,” says K Kiyama. “They are not surprised to see him and don’t even acknowledge him. What we see here is a chilling sight of Japan where many people are isolated with little consideration for other people.”

He adds that Betsuyaku “does not express hope or dream much, but a heartrending romanticism is hidden in the depth of his work. His poetic lyricism gradually rises up before us.” In directing the play, K Kiyama says his aim is to “make clear the distance between each isolated character, arranging ten independent characters in the right place on the Zen-like stage with minimum set.”

The set includes a telephone pole, a desk, a bus stop and a bench. The tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, are accompanied on stage by characters that include two young female receptionists and an elderly woman with knitting gear. Godot arrives holding an umbrella and abruptly introduces himself to the receptionists. He keeps telling Estragon and Vladimir that he is Godot but they fail to react in the way he expects.

As K Kiyama says: “Godot has finally come but nothing changes with his arrival. There is no dramatic encounter. This is a slapstick comedy — much more comic than Beckett’s original. There lies Betsuyaku’s strong critical recognition of the present society in this bold challenge.”

Betsuyaku says that in Waiting for Godot “it is fundamental that Godot will never appear. In today’s Japan, people only rarely have a chance to experience something in reality, but they get a huge amount of information from different sources, so they may understand things intellectually without having any actual experience of them. Therefore I thought that if Godot came today people would not be able to meet him or experience the drama of the meeting.”

As to writing his own take on Waiting for Godot, Betsuyaku says that “plays should be altered to suit the situation or place or community. I encourage people to modify my plays and sometimes ask people to do them in their local dialect. Theatre is about handing down tradition and converting it to fit its current context.”

Betsuyaku says that he is emphasising the humour in Godot Has Come and is confident about how it will be received in Cork.