DANIEL FRUMAN gives us a “non”-review of James Macdonald’s production of Waiting for Godot at Theatre Royal Haymarket.
Nothing to be said—at least I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. Truth be told, the fear of saying anything about a production of Waiting for Godot is that someone might say something back. In a play where “nothing happens” about two “nobodies” talking about “nothing” and reaching “no” conclusions, every staging, blocking, costuming, acting, lighting, timing choice becomes inexplicably worthy of analysis; like a big well, where you toss in your own two cents for good luck until it inevitably overflows, and turns into a mound of rusty coins.
Let’s not do that then. Let’s say nothing about the actors’ ages, the lack of bowler hats, the pale surgical lights or Ben Whishaw’s whiny Vladimir. Let’s instead follow the example of the two tramps and do nothing. Merely observe.
And so, the question arises: is Ben Whishaw wearing a wig, or has he managed to maintain that huge head of dry curls by refusing to wash it? Do the actors trim their beards at all? And if so, I wonder what trimmers and guards they use and how often they employ them. I counted thirteen branches on the dead tree, but I could be wrong. I was one of the few members of the audience laughing consistently. The characters, after all, were the spitting image of South Park characters, and instead of Estragon (named after an ancient Saint) and Vladimir (also named after an ancient Saint), Kyle and Stan stood on the dusty white stage, framed by the gilded proscenium.
How do the actors feel about each other? Do they know each other’s coffee orders? Do they ever go to the pub and talk about what’s on their minds, or do they try their utmost to escape the Haymarket and go home and forget about any of this, till they return again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and do it all again? I’m left wondering how Whitshaw keeps his rolled-up sleeves intact, so perfectly static the whole time, and what is Tom Edden’s (Lucky) workout routine to be able to remain just as static as Didi’s sleeves in the way he stands and holds the bags without flinching or blinking?
How do you translate absurdity? This play, of course, is originally in French, and has been auto translated by Beckett. Does that matter at all? In the slightest? Why not do it in French? The sermon on the mount, camel, eye of a needle and all that—was it funny in the original Ancient Greek, or did it lose its meaning when Jesus said it in Aramaic? Why is it that in Russian needles have ears, and in English eyes? In the original text it’s merely a hole—so is the metaphor (for surely it’s a metaphor) more absurd when it’s given in translation? What about Godot makes one look at it and read it as absurd beyond the label itself? And to that end, which translation of the play is the most absurd?
These are pointless questions. As the years trudge along like Lucky on Pozzo’s orange leash, Beckett’s recitative back-and-forths increasingly resemble our daily texting habits. His bouts of musing and poesy that ignite and vanish, read like memes we send to group chats when doom-scrolling at 3 am. Gogo and Didi are the norm, and their immobility is neither unique nor novel. All that is left of the play’s instantly recognisable charm—its accoutrements—are done away with, chameleonising it with any modern, plain-clothes Shakespeare production, or Almeida West End transfer. To call this a fault would be to ignore that this is the play’s intent—and key selling-point. And it for the most part achieves its purpose of democratisation, its absurdity now coming from its aesthetic denial of Beckett’s vision, where the audience is forced to wonder: why ditch the bowler hats?
Senility is unimportant here and age ceases to matter; when the characters fall down and can’t get back up, you don’t believe it for an instant, but can’t help admiring the stubborn resolve of the direction to squeeze out all the discordance it can from its pointed miscasting, and to try to weave a tale of millennial depression instead of post-war anxiety. It’s not a stretch to say that the next production of the play might as well have the two leads dressed in blue suits in imitation of Trump and Biden.
For Waiting for Godot has all the auguries of a classic: it’s boring, no one’s read it, and everyone pretends to like it—except that none of this is true at all. It’s a lot harder to enjoy this play than it is not to, and a production of it, in my view, succeeds if it makes the task even more difficult; which this one peculiarly manages to achieve, but by striving to do the exact opposite.
Great time, beautiful experience, demanded a post-performance dip to a cocktail bar. I wish I’d seen the understudies instead.
Featured image courtesy of Marc Brenner.
