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SHOES THAT ARE LEFT BEHIND: GÁBOR TOMPAS BECKETT HERITAGE
WAITING FOR GODOT: WHITE SHOES, WHITE STATIC
Tompa’s sixth Waiting for Godot opened at Tamási Áron Theatre, Sepsiszent¬
györgy, Romania on 9 October 2005, to commemorate the hundredth
anniversary of Beckett’s birthday and to mark the year when György Harag
(Transylvanian Hungarian director, actor, theatre company founder and
mentor to many theatre artists, including Gabor Tompa), would have become
eighty years old. Later, in 2006, the production toured to various venues, for
example the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj and at the abandoned missile base of
the Hungarian air force, the Theatre Base of Zsambék, as part of the Zsambék
Theatre Festival.
Tompa’s idea of the set was first realized by the set and costume designer
Andras Both in Belfast: a vast empty space filled with shoes and boots, all
painted white. In the Sepsiszentgyörgy production this basic concept
is preserved, with a great emphasis on Estragon’s individual pair of boots,
as well as on the countless slippers and footwear covering the entire stage.
They are distributed unevenly, a line of shoes here and there, thinner and
denser sequences, as if their owners had had to leave them behind in haste,
with not a soul remaining to re-arrange the shoes in order. All of them show
visible signs of wear so that we can imagine the feet that had trodden in them,
and what had been above — ankles, knees, skirts, trousers, and faces. The
spectacle is reminiscent of the Holocaust memorial Shoes on the Danube
Bank, a sculpture in Budapest created by Gyula Pauer that consists of sixty
pairs of cast-iron shoes along the east bank of the river, near the Parliament,
to honor the people (mainly Budapest Jews) who were murdered by fascist
Arrow Cross militiamen during World War II. The victims were ordered to
take off their shoes, and were shot into the water, leaving only their shoes
behind on the bank. On Tompa’s stage, a few inches left from the center, there
is a large heap made entirely of abandoned shoes, reminiscent of death camps
and the mountains of carefully selected objects stolen from the victims. An
old, discarded TV set is placed on top, with electric wires hanging out of it.
Also, there is a whiteness over the stage, which, rather than paint, appears
to be a thick layer of dust or cement-powder that becomes even whiter in
the second act, covering a desolate place, a no man’s land. From the very
beginning, the first question that comes to mind at the sight of the set is what
has happened here — the mystery that also Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, and
Lucky are so eager to find out.
In Tompa’s direction, the collective traumas of humanity are at the same
time individual traumas. The show opens with a single spotlight focusing
on Estragon’s boots — he is struggling with them badly — and then the
13 Ibid., 185.
+ 9] +