Godot Online: an unfinished meeting
In March 2020, acting students from Tampere University and theatre students from Coventry University began a two-week remote exploration of selected scenes from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The collaboration reunited the institutions that had started Immersive Telepresence in Theatre four years earlier. After the remote phase, the Coventry students were due to travel to Tampere, where the two casts would meet, continue rehearsing and begin developing the work towards performances connected with Coventry’s UK City of Culture year in 2021.
The journey was cancelled only a day before the students were due to leave. The two casts had created work together and expected to continue it physically, but they never occupied the same room and still have not met.
Returning to Coventry and Tampere
The project marked a return to the founding partnership after collaborations with institutions in Helsinki, Gothenburg, Poznań and the United States. Coventry and Tampere brought several years of shared experience to the work, but the students themselves were a new ensemble.
The choice of Waiting for Godot was driven by Mikko Kanninen, for whom the play was a passion project. After several collaborations built around Shakespeare’s larger public scenes and extensive casts, he wanted to move towards smaller, more concentrated encounters between performers.
Beckett’s text offered an opportunity to focus upon rhythm, silence, repetition and the dependence between individual actors. Vladimir and Estragon fill uncertain time through conversation, disagreement, games and repeated routines, allowing the remote performers to examine how a relationship could be sustained when their partners were physically absent but visibly present through a screen.
The decision was made before COVID-19 threatened the project. Only later did the play’s concern with waiting and an anticipated arrival that never occurs acquire an unforeseen connection with what happened to the casts themselves.
The project explored selections rather than attempting the complete play. The first two weeks were intended to establish the characters, relationships and working methods that would be developed further once the students met in Tampere.
A more advanced connection
Godot Online used the most technically advanced system yet introduced into one of the student projects. After the professional experiment with Paris, Texas in Miami, Coventry and Tampere replaced the usual H.323 videoconferencing equipment with the Nimbra media server developed by Net Insight.
Blackmagic studio cameras were also introduced to improve the image. Nimbra, which had been designed for professional broadcast and live-media transport, provided a more stable connection and reduced latency between the two rehearsal rooms to approximately 40 milliseconds. During Coriolanus Online in 2016, the delay had exceeded 600 milliseconds.
This improvement allowed performers to respond with greater precision and made shared timing feel more natural. The clearer image also offered more detail in facial expression and physical movement than the ageing Polycom equipment used in earlier collaborations.
The improvement came with considerable complexity. Nimbra required specialist configuration and technical knowledge, while the Blackmagic cameras added further equipment to the system. Much of the Tampere expertise was held by Matias Palo, whose experience with Nimbra helped make the connection possible.
The system achieved the project’s best audiovisual quality and lowest latency, but it was not a simple or easily transferable solution. Its success depended upon people who understood the equipment, the network and the requirements of live performance.
Two weeks of remote rehearsal
The casts spent two weeks exploring Beckett’s text through the connected studios. The work was still at an early stage, with scenes being tested before the planned physical rehearsal period in Finland.
COVID-19 remained in the background. Reports were appearing in the news and case numbers were increasing, but neither team initially regarded the virus as an immediate threat to the project. Rehearsals continued on the assumption that the Coventry students would travel as planned.
The participants were not waiting for a decision about whether the journey might happen. They believed that it would. Travel, accommodation and cultural activities had already been arranged, and the remote work was structured around the expectation that everyone would soon continue in the same room.
Packed and ready to travel
The Coventry students had prepared for the Finnish residency for several months. Some had bought winter clothes and boots over Christmas in anticipation of the Tampere weather. By the end of the remote phase, their bags were packed and they were ready to leave.
The Finnish hosts had planned a cultural programme alongside the rehearsals. Tickets had been booked for several theatre performances, while a private sauna had been reserved so that the casts could celebrate completing the project together.
Only a day before the scheduled journey, announcements in both countries made clear that universities were closing and the trip could not proceed. The decision blindsided both groups. The students had expected to travel until almost the final moment, and the practical and social plans built around their arrival disappeared at once.
The casts shared their work on the last day before the institutions closed. By then, the project staff were the only staff members still present at either university. The scenes were still embryonic and had been intended as a record of progress before the residency. Instead, they became the final work produced by that particular ensemble.
The coincidence with Beckett’s play was unavoidable. A project concerned with waiting, uncertainty and an anticipated arrival that never occurs was itself suspended immediately before its participants were due to meet.
Documenting the interrupted project
The documentary on this page follows a process that never reached its intended conclusion. It combines rehearsal footage filmed on iPhones, interviews conducted through Zoom and material from the final sharing between the two casts.
The use of phones and Zoom reflected the sudden change in circumstances. The project had begun in two carefully designed telepresence studios using broadcast-grade equipment, but the students’ final reflections had to be gathered through the domestic technologies that became familiar during lockdown.
The documentary does not present the material as a finished performance. It shows the early scene work, the students’ responses to the collaboration and the abrupt change in their expectations as both countries entered lockdown.
The unrealised 2021 project
The initial hope was that the same casts could return in March 2021 to complete Waiting for Godot. Plans developed beyond simply rescheduling the cancelled journey. A third university would be invited to join the collaboration, testing how an additional institution might be incorporated into the connected performance. Green screen and digital scenery were also being considered as ways of extending the visual language of the piece.
The work would then culminate in performances in Coventry and Tampere during Coventry’s UK City of Culture year. The original cast would be able to finish the project and finally meet the people with whom they had rehearsed.
Continuing COVID-19 restrictions made these plans impossible. By the time international activity could resume more reliably, the original ensemble could no longer be reassembled.
There had also been changes within the founding team. Mikko Kanninen and Matias Palo left Tampere University to pursue new roles, interrupting the continuity created through the earlier projects. Matias’s departure also meant that the institution no longer held the same practical expertise in configuring and operating Nimbra.
COVID-19 was the immediate reason the casts never met, but the loss of personnel and technical knowledge made it increasingly difficult to restart the project in its original form.
What Godot changed
Godot Online demonstrated that technical progress alone could not guarantee the future of an international collaboration. The Nimbra server and Blackmagic cameras produced the highest audiovisual quality achieved by the student projects, but the system was expensive, complex and dependent upon specialist knowledge concentrated within a small team.
Later collaborations returned to Polycom equipment. Its image quality and latency were less impressive, but it was easier to install, explain and operate with new partners. The decision reflected a growing understanding that accessible technology could be more valuable educationally than a technically superior system that few people knew how to support.
The project also exposed the importance of personal and institutional continuity. Equipment could remain in place, but relationships, technical knowledge and confidence could be lost when the people who sustained them moved on.
Coventry and Tampere worked together again in 2022 on Attempts on Her Life, but Godot Online was never completed. Its casts remain connected by a project that stopped at the point when remote collaboration was meant to become a physical meeting.
The project ended with packed bags, unused theatre tickets, a booked sauna and two groups of students who are still waiting to meet. In a story already concerned with waiting, uncertainty and an arrival that never takes place, it became an ending no one had planned.
CAST
Estragon: Vilma Sippola
Vladimir: Lucy Bullock
Estragon: Lasse Viitamäki
Vladimir: Rebecca Fox
Estragon: Katriina Lilienkampf
Vladimir: Aaron Patel
Boy: Kasperi Kola
Estragon: Emmi Ranta-Ojala
Vladimir: James Hunter
Estragon: Miika Suonperä
Vladimir: Beth Kiddie
Estragon: Henriikka Heiskanen
Vladimir: Karo Chranowska
Estragon: Senna Vodzogbe
Vladimir: Holly Gow
Estragon: Kristiina Karhu
Vladimir: Niyi Bello
Estragon: Aino Karlstedt
Vladimir: Ksenjia Bolsakova Boy: Courtney Baker
Estragon: Eero-Heikki Puustinen
Vladimir: Ryan Clarke
Estragon: Esme Kaislakari
Vladimir: Tom Westwood