Samuel Beckett, Paris, 2021
Written at breakneck speed in response to dramatic political events, Beckett’s En Attendant Mon-Vote was originally composed in French and subsequently translated into English by the author. We have signaled that unusual creative history by retaining the French title for this translated edition.
Notorious for the absurdity and nihilism at its core, En Attendant introduces the world to the bitter bickering, the pointless game-playing, the shameless histrionics, the conspiracy-theory paranoia, and the sheer human pathos of its central characters, Trumpimir and Giulagon — two men whose desperation to remain “center-stage” in their own lives is continually undone by their sense of the almost comic futility of existence.
Thus burdened, both men alternate grandiose aggressive activity with long stretches of withdrawn enigmatic silence, a silence broken, for Trumpimir, by repeated rounds of golf (see the character Luckleigh’s famous speech about golf, as well as tennis, late in the play), and, for both men, by farting in public. Indeed it is the combination of meaningless trivial activity (golf) and the reduction of the human, with all its metaphysical striving, to the lowest animal forms of expression, which gives En Attendant its peculiar tragic/comic power.
We offer an excerpt from the play here.
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Characters
Trumpomir
Giulagon
Luckleigh
Pozzeo
ACT I
A country road. A tree. A derelict landscaping company with a sign in front reading Four Seasons.
Evening.
Trumpomir, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take apart a voting machine. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Giulagon.
TRUMPOMIR: (Giving up again). Nothing to be done.
GIULAGON: (Advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart) I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Giulagon, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Trumpomir.) So there you are again.
TRUMPOMIR: Am I?
GIULAGON: I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone to Mar-A-Lago forever.
TRUMPOMIR: Me too.
GIULAGON: Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
TRUMPOMIR: (irritably). Not now, not now.
GIULAGON: (hurt, coldly) May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON: On the phone.
GIULAGON: (admiringly) The phone! With who?
TRUMPOMIR:(miserably) Raffensperger.
GIULAGON: And he didn’t back you?
TRUMPOMIR: BACK me? (Lets out an enormous fart.) Certainly he didn’t back me. Refused to pick up the phone eighteen times before he finally answered and then he mocked me and then he released a recording of the call! … I’m still waiting… for my vote…