“Waiting for Godot”, a brilliant way to pass the time

How does one sit through a three-hour play about, well, nothing? The answer lies at Theatre Royal Haymarket, in James McDonald’s production of Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot” starring Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati.

I had studied Beckett’s play many years ago when I was studying literature at Durham, but to see it live was a totally different experience. The plot of the drama is extremely simple: two men are waiting for a person named Godot. They are on a road, there is a bare tree on stage as well as a stone. Everything else–their background, why they are waiting, how long they’ve been waiting for–is uncertain and open for discussion, which they do a lot throughout the play.

The comedic aspect which I missed while reading the play years ago jumped right out of the page for me yesterday evening; the production elicited laughter from the audience almost every minute. It was funny in every way, be it the jokes, the wordplay, the slapstick humour, the physical comedy or even the uncomfortable silences. Yet the comic side of things was always accompanied by its dark shadow–the idea that life is meaningless and that Vladimir and Estragon’s wait for Godot is futile–lurking just around the corner, waiting to strike at any moment. In fact, the more intense the laughter, the more we are aware of this maddening aspect of life, as we saw in the second half of the play.

The laughter the play drew from the audience showed just how much the effect of “Waiting for Godot” depends on its self-awareness as a play. We the audience, despite recognizing the absurd situation of the characters, continue to sit through the play, allowing ourselves to be entertained as the madness onstage unfolds before us, just so to “pass the time”. Just as the characters recognize the absurdity of their “waiting”, so we, in laughing at the absurdity of their situation, also begin to be aware of the absurdity of our own situation, and so the begin to enter Samuel Beckett’s world. Even during the interval, as I stood in the long queue for the gent’s toilet, I began to see how absurd it was that just because people in front of me were going into a door with the word “gent’s toilet” inscribed onto it that I should have complete faith that I, too, would find the answer to my needs in that door. It wasn’t so much the door that was absurd but the fact that I could put my complete faith in it, and the recognition that our lives operate by such complete faiths in order for us to make sense of it. Was I going mad? Probably.

We, like Vladimir (brilliantly played by Ben Whishaw), try to find meaning in everything. We try to connect the dots, to create a linear narrative, but what “Waiting for Godot” does is call into question (it even does it literally, since the characters are asking questions that never get answered all the time, even the simplest ones) everything we’ve taken for granted. When your companion (Estragon, played by Lucian Msamati) doesn’t remember anything from what you thought was yesterday; when the passers-by (Pozzo and Lucky) are either completely insane or denies the notion of Time; when everything seems to repeat itself over and over (Godot’s messenger boy coming to relay the message that Godot’s imminent arrival will be delayed for another day); can you still believe in your own truth? Can you still believe in your own sense of Time, or even that Time is a linear concept and that at the end of it one will surely be able to make sense of everything that has happened?

The laughter veils a stark reality which hits the audience as the play finishes on an open ending (or rather, repeats itself). Or perhaps it is a way through which we can see perceive absurd reality.

Despite the specificity of Beckett’s stage directions (since the setting is of great significance to the play), director James McDonald’s versatile understanding and use of the space allowed us to feel its starkness and barrenness that seems to stretch to the end of time, while simultaneously feeling as if having four people onstage (the most there ever is at one time) almost crowds out the landscape. This was most dramatically felt when Lucky (Tom Edden) started “thinking” aloud and Vladimir and Estragon, who couldn’t bear his incessant speech, ran in and offstage. The landscape slightly jutting out of the actual stage also helped with breaking the fourth wall, creating a much more intimate distance with the audience despite the actual size of the theatre.

Notwithstanding how impressive it is for Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati to talk at each other nonstop for almost three hours, they struck me as a wonderful duo, Ben being a slightly anxious personality, constantly trying to find meaning in his situation while understanding the absurdity of it all, and Lucian being a much more direct, blunt and pragmatic person (every small action of his sent off peals of laughter from the audience). But for me the standout performance was actually Jonathan Slinger playing Pozzo, who managed to swing between being the extremely arrogant, imperious and merciless master of Lucky to cutting a lonely figure waxing Shakespearean in his grand and lofty speeches about existence. And to come out in the second half as a blind man almost unrecognizable as the character he was in the first half!

The acting may be amazing, the staging brilliant, but ultimately it is Samuel Beckett’s worldview that the audience comes away with. “Waiting for Godot” is here to stay at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until the 14th of December.

Rating: 9/10

Article featured image credits to London Theatre.