Waiting for Godot – Octagon Theatre, Bolton

Writer: Samuel Beckett 

Director: Dominic Hill 

Most famously described as the play where nothing happens – twice, Waiting for Godot is still considered one of the most significant plays of the twentieth century. Born out of the theatre of the absurd and known for its beauty and brutality, Samuel Beckett’s beguiling classic is his most widely performed piece. In a co-production with The Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, the play finishes its run at The Octagon Theatre in Bolton. 

Two vagrants, Valdimir and Estrangon, spend their days waiting. For whom, why, where and for how long nobody really knows. Trying their best to pass the time of their miserable existence they bicker and fight, muse about philosophy and religion, endlessly confuse one another and ultimately question the meaning of existence and the futility of being alive. It is breathtakingly bleak and brutal yet funny and endlessly existential. Beckett constantly wants us, via ‘Didi’ and ‘Gogo,’ to question what it means to be alive and the nature of existence. It is as big a topic as the human mind can conceive conveyed by the lowest down and outs. 

The pairing of George Costigan and Matthew Kelly as Vladimir and Estragon is rooted in their decades of friendship. Didi and Gogo don’t know quite how long they have been symbiotically conjoined but they guess at fifty years. Costigan and Kelly must be able to boast a similar timeframe. They have an ease with each other onstage and short cuts that can only be forged over time. Director Dominic Hill lets them furiously overlap one another whilst protecting the rhythm of the language, adding a pace to this production as well as a believable dynamic. Their long white beards and shaggy, unkempt hair stuffed under caps would see them not out of place on a street corner. Costigan is dressed in tracksuit top and Parker Anorak – a hybrid somewhere between Buster Merryfield’s Uncle Albert in Only Fool’s and Horses and David Threlfall’s Frank Gallagher in Shameless. Costigan flounders between confusion and exasperation, angry at himself and the situation. Kelly’s Estragon is sheer bewilderment. Perhaps in the depths of dementia, they need to pass the time somehow before doing it all again. They work brilliantly together. 

Hill’s production leans heavily into the self-deprecation Beckett enjoys in the script. Costigan addresses the audience directly. We are the voyeurs of their painted lives, passing judgement on a work of art that many find impenetrable. “It’s terrible” they comment. “Worse than a pantomime.” At one point the house lights are raised during one of Vladimir’s lengthier tirades on the search for meaning: “What are we doing here?” he asks. He eyeballs the audience. It is a genuine question.  

The ‘distraction’ of waiting comes from Pozzo (Gbolahan Obisesan) and Lucky (Michael Hodgson). The master and slave invaders are absurd, confusing and disturbing. They become the ‘entertainment’ for Didi and Gogo in their endless desperation. Obisesan’s Pozzo has the flamboyancy of a 1970s New York pimp complete with a heavy, full-length shaggy coat. Hodgson squeaks occasionally as the almost entirely mute slave left literally holding the bags. As they pass through we a reminded of the ‘framing’ of the play – helped by Jean Chan’s set design. Her desolate junk yard no-man’s-land has the infamous tree growing through a discarded car door; the men sharing a discarded half driver’s seat. The shabby and damaged sepia canvas backdrop could be a fading photograph or the still of a moving cinema image stopped in time. It conveys a sense of entrapment: that they can never leave the frame.  

Hill’s production is a reminder that Beckett’s play is much more about waiting. He highlights Beckett’s desire to question why we are all huddled together watching the (non) action. It becomes a comment on the purpose of theatre and a microcosm of the purpose of life and existence itself. “Well, that passed the time” Vladimir comments at one point – and it does.  

Reviewed on 16th April. 

Runs until 2nd May.