Waiting For Godot – Theatre Royal Haymarket, London

Writer: Samuel Beckett

Director: James Macdonald

Plot summaries rarely come as easy to pen as is the case with Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Waiting For Godot. Querulous, forgetful vagrants Didi and Dodo stand on a barren hillside aside a single tree, waiting endlessly for someone named Godot, who never arrives. While they wait, yoked together in a kind of relentless oppression, they banter on the absurdities, contradictions, and uncertainties of life. Pompous landowner Pozzo and his huffing, puffing, salivating servant Lucky make a couple of appearances. Not much else happens. This is a harsh and seemingly hopeless realm that reeks of a terrible, foreboding silence. Nothing here feels likely to change, but that is the point; the piece is about lives going on and on in the absence of reason or explanation.

The sparseness and opacity of Waiting For Godot’s text create room for a host of different theatrical interpretations, from the minimalist to the overtly political, to the surreal, to the post-modern metatheatrical. Recent productions have proven box office durability; indeed, a decade and a half ago, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart sold out an extended run in this very same theatre. A full-on Broadway outing with Keanu Reeves (of all people) beckons next year. Whether this production, admirable as it is, can fill the capacious Theatre Royal all the way up to Christmas remains to be seen. At two and three-quarter hours, it may challenge current West End audience attention spans.

Director James Macdonald offers up a production that boasts bare-bones staging (Rae Smith’s post-apocalyptic moonscape set is simple, stark, and unembellished) and dials up the slapstick, but resists the temptation to direct us towards any specific reading. Comedy aside and eschewing the temptation to radicality, the director seems comfortable to let Beckett’s ambiguity speak for itself. The piece remains true to the writer’s own belief the play should “strive above all to avoid definition”.

Of course, too great an emphasis on humour might threaten to unbalance a work that is fundamentally about hopelessness, uncertainty, and the meaninglessness of human existence. There are times, particularly in the second half, when Macdonald’s production threatens to spiral into something approaching sentimentality. Pozzo’s second-half tirade against blindness is directed with a little too much conscious pathos. Thankfully, an energetic and finely tuned star turn from a bearded, bobble-hatted Ben Whishaw provides sufficient acidity throughout to temper any inclination to soppiness.

Wishaw’s gurning Didi is fidgety, lycanthropic, and angry, forever scanning the sky: the kind of track-suited, jay-walking beggar liable to accost you for booze-money on the way home from the Theatre Royal. A more subdued performance as Gogo from a crotchety, hunched, head-held-in-his-hands Lucian Msamati balances Whishaw’s volatility. Perhaps Msamati is a little too understated on occasion.

Embracing, holding fast to each other like infants in a playground, what emerges from the chemistry between Wishaw and Msamati (both as fine dramatic actors as they are comic) is quite how much this production’s Didi and Gogo love one another. “Together again at last, get up while I embrace you,” one tells the other, tender companionship their only respite from the desperate loneliness of the human condition. These two, with their endless jabbering and bickering, could be Laurel and Hardy. A music-hall-style hat-swapping routine feels like it comes straight out of a 1930s Hollywood comedy.

Jonathan Slinger’s Pozzo is painted in broad, vivid strokes. Horsewhip in hand, a brace of dead foxes around his neck, the character channels the self-righteous fury of a far-right army colonel. Perhaps the fourth-wall-breaking nods to the audience are over-egged (“the tears of the world are a constant quantity”, he says with a none-too-sly look at the front row), but the performance gets Pozzo’s alluring loathsomeness spot on.

Tom Edden’s sunken-eyed Lucky looks like he has not slept for a week. The character’s famous “thinking” monologue, a torrent of disjointed and incoherent thoughts that devolves into pure gibberish, earns the actor his own mid-scene round of applause. He deserves it. Dehumanised, literally collapsing under the burden of his suffering, Edden delivers the speech as a bitter, slow-building cry for release from pain. Think Edward Munch’s The Scream given tremendous theatrical effect.

Bruno Poet’s subtle lighting design delivers stark whites for afternoon, warm browns for sunset, and long moonlit shadows set against a jet-black sky for those nights when Godot just refuses to show up.

Runs until 14 December 2024