Samuel Beckett’s hapless drifters Estragon and Vladimir have been vainly waiting for Godot for a loooong time in this production, which has been touring since 2005. Now, Beckett's most famous play come back to the Arts Theatre, where the English language version of 'Waiting for Godot' (which first opened in Paris) debuted in 1955.
The story has long since infiltrated the theatrical aether and become a staple of GCSE Literature lessons. The novelty of Beckett’s playful dance with our need for meaning and with the conventions of theatre is no longer there.
Director Peter Reid’s staging is how you might imagine the play, if you’d never seen it before: a solitary rock, a twig of a tree and a blank backdrop. Everything is stripped back as Beckett tests our ability to deal with nothingness. But in spite of this sense of familiarity, Reid has a deft handle on the rhythm of the words.
Patrick O’Donnell and Nick Devlin shade in the differences between the rag-tag Estragon and Valdimir. They have an easy, clownish chemistry, as Estragon’s neediness is contrasted with Vladimir’s dimly growing sense of futility. They carry us through the play’s absurdist humour into something bleak.
There’s also good work from Paul Kealyn as the pompous and cruel Pozzo, who crosses the travellers’ path with Paul Elliot’s enslaved Lucky. Elliot makes Lucky’s every back-bowed step agonising and spouts pseudo-intellectual gibberish like a furiously faulty machine. Their two appearances reflect 'Waiting for Godot's cyclical nature.
The play spills over with biblical allusions (not least Godot’s name). You could read it as an allegory of most of tawdry human history or you could watch it as an existential joke about storytelling, divided by an interval. This production succeeds in dangling all of those tempting carrots while keeping it mournfully funny.