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Godot’s all too human humour
WAITING FOR GODOT
Theatre Royal Haymarket
“IN a post-apocalyptic world without rules, two men cling to life. But how long can they hold on?” If Hollywood ever deigned, in a fit of hubris, to make Waiting for Godot: The Movie, that or something similar would be the tag line.
For the two leads, the tragic-comic tramp double act of Didi and Gogo, the producers need look no further than Sean Mathias’s current production where Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen – for it is indeed they – fill the reeking hobnailed boots in question.
How far Samuel Beckett’s existentialist comedy of manners has come since it was first staged in 1953. Where once critics spat, garlands of praise now lie. The Haymarket audience is a curious mix of turtle-necked chin-strokers who know exactly what Beckett meant by it all and nonplussed tourists presumably mortified by this peppercorn rendition of X-Men 4. Magneto has hit the bottle, and it seems even Professor X is not recession-proof.
McKellen proves immediately that he is much more than a film star. His Gogo is a wiry, Yorkshire stumblebum saddled with raw aches and the laboured mannerisms of a high-society drunk. For a world-weary hobo – and an actor of advancing years – he brims with extraordinary energy; those luminescent eyes burn out from a white shock of hair and beard.
Stewart fans would no doubt say their man, as the slightly more collected of the two, Didi, is the perfect foil for McKellen. Certainly, the chemistry between them is charming (the actors have been friends since the seventies, which may help), but I think Stewart is too unremarkable, too much the everyman, to stand out against this featureless wasteland.
From its gallows humour – “Shall we hang ourselves?” asks Gogo. “It would give us an erection,” replies Didi – to the abstract cruelties experienced by the characters, Godot is grotesque. Look at how the perennially histrionic Simon Callow fares in this land, in his element as the pompous and abusive Pozzo.
Here time is a measurement of punishment, not progress; conversation is desperate; narrative is conspicuously absent; identity is fleeting; and laughter dies on the wind. That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Ostensibly a two and a half hour play about a couple of vagrants waiting for something to happen which never does, Waiting for Godot is also one of the great plays of the 20th century. Its mordant, brilliant reflections on the human condition have equal resonance for all, whether duke or dustbin man, philosopher or X-Men fan.
Almost everyone, that is.
After the applause, a woman in the stall behind says to her companion: “It’s very long for what it is, isn’t it?”
Beckett, I think, would have liked that.
Until July 26
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