Beckett & Ancel
The Most Difficult Plays – n° 19.
Play & Video Game
Globox looks like nothing, it is too massive to be in close-up, too blue to be seen from afar, too soft not to be mistaken for a weird mushroom
But he is a major character in the adventures of Rayman, created by Michel Ancel for Ubisoft.
He’s the kindly fool – the friend we drag along and can’t chase away, because, well, he is kind.
The study of his brain shows a little speck lost at the end of an overly massive ocular nerve – all floating in a big empty cavity…
In short, he is an outstanding and over-loved character of the Rayman series, in the category: adorable and harmless fool.
Estragon looks like nothing, he appears slumped on the road, busy trying to take off his shoes – but when the brain does not work, the shoe does not go. He had to take them off every day … yes yes, always constraints, things to do, even when you have given up being an honorable man … but the shoes are stuck and he suffers.
As you have understood, it is about proposing a totally scandalous staging of Beckett’s cult play: Waiting for Godot.
Let’s see if it can work – before mentioning all the problems posed by this proposal.
Estragon spent the night in a ditch – after being beaten by people, but he no longer knows who they are, these people.
He doesn’t care about all this, Estragon.
He cares about waiting.
Isn’t that enough ? All right… maybe not.
So he cares about waiting for someone. Tomorrow.
The nice thing about tomorrow is that it’s never today.
So he’s not in such a hurry – he’ll have time to take off his shoes and tinker with a few things before tomorrow.
You see, he is waiting for Godot, that’s what he has to do in life. It’s a complex job – waiting is not for everyone – but it’s a job he can do, so he waits.
The powerful intellectual quality of his answers makes me suspect that he has a brain as developed as Globox’s.
The advantage of having a mini-brain in an oversized skull is that the brain is not too tight.
In a word, Globox would be perfect to play the character of Estragon.
There is an uncommon community of mental power between them.
With a huge advantage for Globox over all the actors in the world: Globox is unfathomably stupid.
And he allows us to put Waiting for Godot, an absurd play, in what is, in my humble opinion, its register: the comic.
I don’t know if you’ve had the good fortune to see Godot played comically – for my part, it hasn’t happened once. I’ve only seen stagings of rare intellectuality, of abysmal depth, playing with greyness and silences – and the most intelligent spectators coming out saying that it was deliciously funny.
Lacking such a fine sense of humor, I propose to see, for once, a staging made for spectators who, like me, are impervious to very subtle humor. Thus, Godot by Globox.
If you take the time to consider the feet of this famous character, you can see that he would have some difficulty in removing his shoes :
that he would be very credible in explaining that he doesn’t remember much.
Even more credible when he would be confronted with the infernal duo Lucky/Pozzo: he had felt sorry for Lucky and what happens? He gets beaten up by this stupid bad guy???
In a word, Globox is almost made for the role.
Of course, putting this on a stage would give Altair a nasty iconoclastic reputation.
The theatre would surely lose all its distinguished clientele.
That said, you have to choose your clientele – the distinguished clientele is not the target.
On the other hand, the clientele who know Globox – and who do not know Estragon at all – would necessarily be delighted.
As for the practical side – there are two problems
The first is physical: we have to create a credible robotic Globox, and give it a voice: that’s where the real actor comes in, not on the stage but behind it, giving the lines.
This is not a problem, since all this is already done, and often very well.
The second is legal – Globox is a creation of Michel Ancel, under the leadership of Ubisoft. So we should be able to release Globox… and everything would be fine.
Release or make agreements, of course.
I’ll come back to this point, which will have to be worked on: the release of cult characters to use them as actors is such a fundamental link that I don’t see how to avoid it.
Featured Image : Globox, in Rayman 3 – Michel Ancel – Ubisoft
ALTAIR - Concepts 