Review: Waiting for Godot, Theatre Royal Haymarket

I try Waiting for Godot once again but even with Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, it ain’t for me

“Think!”

I’ve never really gotten on with Samuel Beckett’s plays. I’ve seen a few over the years but none of those productions have managed to penetrate his gnomic style sufficiently for me to get ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ may be and there’s clearly something there. As Waiting for Godot returns to the Theatre Royal Haymarket (where it played in 2009 and 2010), it is festooned with the title of “most significant English-language play of the 20th century” but, you know, just not for me.

Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in the strictness with the dictatorial inflexibility of Beckett, and latterly his estate, in how his work is presented. No rights are granted to any production that doesn’t strictly adhere to the original stage directions and so the opportunities for directors to offer up interpretations of Beckett’s work just don’t exist. Consequently if you know you don’t like one production of one of his plays, it’s not hugely likely going to have your mind changed by another.

So James Macdonald can bring the likes of Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw to the lead roles of Estragon and Vladimir and have Rae Smith design a striking, almost apocalyptic set around the famous tree. But it doesn’t feel like anything new or revelatory or essential, it just is Waiting for Godot as you know it. A bit funny at times, a lot punishing at plenty others, an existential cri de coeur that once again, for me, screams into the void rather than inspiring a re-consideration of Beckett’s work.

Msamati and Whishaw do play well off of each other and able support comes from Jonathan Slinger and Tom Edden as Pozzo and Lucky. And I do salute producers that strive to put this kind of work on in big West End houses, that is undoubtedly a good thing. It’s just not for me and I’ll happily wait another 14 years and more before contemplating seeing it again.

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