Waiting for Godot was the first West End play I saw as an eighteen-year-old, having purchased a £10 ticket in the rafters of the Theatre Royal Haymarket and a day return flight from Belfast with RyanAir that left just enough time to get to the theatre, see the show and head straight back to the airport, after first taking just a moment to gawk with the other tourists at Piccadilly Circus.
Some things never change: the theatre is the same, the hard bench in the rafters is still there, and the tourists will never leave Piccadilly. Other things do: Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are subbed for Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati and everything is looking a little more contemporary, though still notably Beckettian. Has Samuel Beckett’s estate loosened its iron grip on his work?
“The only thing I’m sure of is that they’re wearing bowlers,” Beckett said of his play – today they wear a bobble hat and a trapper hat (a bowler does appear later). The “country road” of the stage directions is just about there, cutting across the stage at an angle – the divide between the road and the bank along its edge is barely visible. The famous lone willow tree droops stage right. The text is as ever – as it has been since its London debut in 1955.
Like McKellan and Stewart in 2009, Whishaw and Msamati play up the comedy as much as the tragedy, though not always in partnership, even if the two actors make a fine pair as Vladimir and Estragon, respectively. Whishaw is all lightness, his mind moving at pace, Msamati, often slouched or seated, slumped and asleep, is seemingly weighed down by this life they are living and the endless wait for Godot.
A play of two halves (in which, famously, nothing happens, twice), it’s also a play of two pairs with Jonathan Slinger as Pozzo and Tom Edden as Lucky completing the set. Slinger is particularly good as the temperamental Pozzo who finds enlightenment of a sort. Edden delivery of Lucky’s difficult speech is incredibly entertaining as he ramps up the energy, earning applause for the feat of memory as he collapses in a heap on the road.
There is a fair argument that James Macdonald’s production goes too far with the comedy at the expense of pathos. We pity these two men as another day waiting for the never-arriving Godot draws to a close but probably not as much as we could do because, actually, they seem to be making quite a lot of fun out of killing the time.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (Very Good)
Waiting for Godot is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 21 December
