Waiting for Godot returns to Teatro Alvear under Pimenta’s direction.

Waiting for Godot returns to Avenida Corrientes

The Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires is presenting a new staging of Waiting for Godot, the play by Samuel Beckett, at the Teatro Presidente Alvear, at Avenida Corrientes 1639. It is directed by the Spanish director Helena Pimenta, and performances run Wednesday to Saturday at 8 pm and Sundays at 7 pm.

On stage there is an almost bare platform, with arid ground and a single tree without leaves. Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait there for a certain Godot who never shows up, and the whole play rests on that absence. More than seventy years after Beckett made it known in 1953, the work still refuses to give answers, and that refusal is part of its appeal.

Beckett’s proposal broke with the structure that Western theatre had upheld for centuries. Action is left suspended as a silent tension, and the characters fill the wait with minimal tasks that never add up to a conventional plot. What remains is time empty of purpose, which becomes the true material of the play.

A strong cast and a director with a track record

Daniel Aráoz plays Estragon with a plaintive voice and an almost unlimited repertoire of gestures. Luis Ziembrowski, as Vladimir, is quick-witted and crosses the wide stage from end to end without standing still. Together they talk, laugh, play, dream and complain, and they flirt with the absurd through humor.

In one passage, Aráoz’s character asks his companion for a kiss, a line the audience cheered and that Infobae links to the humor of Olmedo. Osvaldo Santoro plays Pozzo and Pablo Seijo plays Lucky, two occasional visitors to that desert landscape who also drink from the existential emptiness that invades everything.

At two key moments a boy appears, played by two young performers who alternate in the role, and announces that Godot will not come today but may arrive tomorrow. That announcement jolts the two protagonists with a blow of reality.

The director is Helena Pimenta, who was the first woman to head the Spanish institution Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico. She also won the Premio Nacional de Teatro in her country.

The staging: a stage for thought

Pimenta starts from a clear idea about why the play remains relevant. For her, the tension created by the wait “is at the heart of the piece and has to resonate in the spectator’s ear”.

The staging is austere and opts for an old-style platform, an empty and broken space. The director defines it as “a stage for thought”, where human beings who are beginning to abandon one another are set in contrast. The aesthetic reinforces Beckett’s central idea: when time is shown bare, with nothing to soften it, a detached view of existence itself appears.

Language holds a central place in her reading. According to Pimenta, Beckett’s characters exist because they speak: when action is no longer possible, only the word remains as their own territory. But what they say and what happens on stage are two parallel realities that never cross, and from that distance comes the discomfort the play causes in the audience.

A classic of the postwar years

Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in French, between 1948 and 1949, in the years immediately after the war. Europe was still absorbing the horror of the Nazi camps and beginning to feel disillusioned with the Soviet regime.

The philosopher Michel Foucault saw the 1953 Paris performance and years later recalled it as a performance that left him breathless and as a moment that marked the rupture of his intellectual generation.

Vladimir and Estragon are survivors, the opposite of the classic tragic hero: where the hero sacrificed his life for a meaning, they choose to live without one. The play engages with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard, since the two characters decide to wait with no certainty that Godot will come. That freedom does not redeem them, but leaves them in radical solitude.

Beckett’s world promises no salvation: life appears as a cycle that repeats, in an ambiguous time where nobody holds on to what was lived or manages to tell one day from another.

If you go

Waiting for Godot is playing at the Teatro Presidente Alvear, at Avenida Corrientes 1639, in the City of Buenos Aires. Performances run Wednesday to Saturday at 8 pm and Sundays at 7 pm. The production is by the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires, with Daniel Aráoz, Luis Ziembrowski, Osvaldo Santoro and Pablo Seijo on stage and direction by Helena Pimenta. Infobae’s report does not give ticket prices or the sales channel, so it is worth checking them at the box office or on the theatre’s website before heading out.