THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Samuel Beckett
Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, London SW1Y 4HT, until December 14, 2024
There's always a giddy excitement with a play I know and love. And Beckett's masterpiece really is that. It is the first proper play that I ever saw back in 1995, done by the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble in Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. I was 16 and the actors pronounced the eponymous and unseen character's name as Godot which is practically embarrassing now and it seemed like so much gibberish to me. But it burrowed into my soul and germinated and inspired me to study literature and later write a Masters Thesis about Beckett.
So yeah, big West End production, big name stars like Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw (I mean… Paddington!). Big excitement.
There's also always a worry as well. Is it going to disappoint compared to the three other memorable productions I have seen. Will Tom Edden's Lucky be as good as Conor Lovett's? Will Ben Whishaw's Vladimir be as good as Barry McGovern's (the first time I truly understood Godot was when I saw the line, 'Get up 'till I embrace you' uttered with an Irish accent)? Or even Hugo Weaving's in the surprisingly amazing Australian production in the Barbican back in 2015?
Happily, under James McDonald's deft guidance, this production has met and exceeded expectations.
Whishaw is incredible and the chemistry he shares with the comically brilliant Msamati is a joy to watch. This is the version I have seen that is most played for laughs, but Beckett, a keen fan of Charlie Chaplin, Abbott and Costello and slapstick comedy, would have blessed it for that. Whishaw and Msamati sync perfectly, comedic interplay bouncing back and forth and delivered with such expert laconic tone, slotting so perfectly into the narrative that for a play where, famously, nothing happens… twice, it feels like it's brimming with zingers powered by bathos, subversion and irony throughout.
Whishaw also manages to not only play the bleak comedy as both dark and funny, but to bring a certain anguish to the part. He does something genuinely difficult for any reinterpretation of this play: he presents it in a way that feels fresh. One feels the palpable sense of poignant pain simmering beneath his movements as he seems to be the only self aware character capable of retaining any memories from the first act to the second.
Whilst the set felt initially a little too sumptuous, filling out the often flattened post apocalyptic hellscape in which the narrative takes place and giving us a three dimensional wasteland of craters and hills, this grew on me. It felt like there was ample room for this new take in the ambiguous space of the text. It allowed for moments of foregrounding and backgrounding and a knowing postmodern self awareness and fun that was also underscored by the periodic and also novel breaking of the fourth wall (not a feature I recall from any production I've seen) and an inclusive and (dare I say the 'i' word) immersive sense that we too were enveloped in the existential state of ennui and barrenness and waiting in which the two protagonists are trapped.
Tom Edden shone as Lucky and was every bit as good as Conor Lovett or any actor I've seen play the part, very much making it his own, very much owning the seemingly unpunctuated famously searing monologue of 'thinking' with mastery and bringing a subtle and tragicomic energy to an incredibly physically demanding part. He plays perfectly off of Jonathan Slinger's pompous bourgeois Pozzo, cracking his whip from behind and looking fabulously ridiculous and yet, as is the nature with this play, bringing an eery and sobering sense of sadness to the second act.
If you're worried you're not going to 'get it', as many often are, don't. Let it come to you. Godot reflects our essential dread of silence and the need to fill our lives with inane chatter to stave off the need to confront existence and the mostly tedious nature of the everyday. Let its devastating epiphanies wash over you... and laugh.
It will pass the time! (that's a Beckett reference… oh never mind).
