Let's go! We can't. Why not? We're waiting

The latest in an occasional series of theatre reviews...

Waiting For Godot : Theatre Royal Haymarket

Back in the dim and distant past when I was in sixth form ('85-'86, kids!), I did stage lighting for school productions and, hard as it is to imagine, this brought me into contact with some slightly more creative types than I usually got to meet during my lessons of Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Computer Science. And the play these creative types were all OBSESSED with was Waiting For Godot (famously reviewed in 1956 as "a play in which nothing happens, twice") - and I can assure you that nothing anyone ever said about it gave me the slightest encouragement to track it down because it sounded absolutely dreadful. However, nearly 40 years later, a certainly older and possibly wiser me read about a new revival with Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati and thought "what's the worst that can happen?". Well...

The curtain stayed resolutely up until the lights went down and revealed a bleak landscape complete with two actors and a single tree, accompanied by some weirdly quiet music. It was so quiet it was barely audible, which seemed a weird production decision - until all was revealed as the woman I was sat next to whispered "SHIT!" and rummaged around in her bag to turn her phone off.  Oops.

For those of you that aren't the literary experts that I obviously am having seen the play, we follow Estragon (Lucian Msamati) and Vladimir (Ben Whishaw) as they, well, do a whole load of nothing (and promptly forget they've done it). They also, at times, encounter Pozzo (Jonathan Slinger) and Lucky (Tom Edden) who merely manage to muddy the waters further and The Boy (who could have been one of three actors) who merely announces that (spoiler alert) Godot won't be showing up any time soon. 

I really can't stress enough that, taken at face value, everything I saw made absolutely no sense - it's two and a half hours of sentences which may, but probably don't, relate to what came before. But, given more time and consideration, a deeper meaning starts to present itself to the audience - oh no, sorry, it totally doesn't and, if anything, it makes even less sense the more you think about it.

Leaving aside any sense of meaning for the time being, it all looks absolutely gorgeous with excellent lighting and an effective but simple set presenting very artistic scenes throughout. It's also well acted - there's (obviously) a load of dramatic pauses but there are also a huge amount of words to learn (although if they missed out large sections, I can assure you that I wouldn't have noticed). Estragon and Vladimir have a close, if unclear, relationship and Lucian and Ben portray that well. Pozzo and Lucky have a master/servant relationship but they are both particularly bizarre characters - Lucky in particular because the role has two sentences in the entire play, but one of them is a stream-of-something monologue of over seven hundred words which took approximately three minutes to get through, so credit to Tom for managing that (and he got a round of applause at the end).

A quick diversion to consider the theatre, this was my second visit here this year (after this) and once again I had an excellent view from the back of the upper circle in a reasonably comfortable seat - it's a lovely old (and quite big) theatre which has been modernised pretty well.

Back to the play, I can totally understand why drama students love it - you can apply your own interpretation to any of it and no-one is going to be able to tell you you're wrong. The Wikipedia entry is fantastically lengthy and has sections on political, psychological (Freudian & Jungian), philosophical (existential and ethical), Christian, autobiographical and sexual interpretations. It also tells us the play was originally written in French (En Attendant Godot) and premiered in French in 1953 and in English in 1955 - apparently there was a version in 2009 which featured Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup, which sounds to me like it could be the luvviest thing ever! 

So, what did I actually make of it all? Having said that it all makes no sense, I have to admit that once I got into it and just went with the flow, I found it strangely compelling. The second half was more different from the first half than I was expecting (there was a definite sense that an unknown passage of time had passed) but it was also very much exactly the same, so I found myself totally getting the comment that "nothing happens, twice". I do have to admit though that if they'd come on at the end of the first half and taken a bow, I'd have given them polite applause and left the theatre none the wiser that I'd only seen half of it - and the couple next to me had a serious debate as to whether to bother staying for the second half (it was unclear at the end whether they were happy with their decision to stay). 

But I'm glad I stuck with it - it wasn't nearly as much of a slog as I feared it might be and it looked fabulous at all times. However (and I may be being harsh on the masses here) I have to say that I think for most people this would probably be too challenging - Mrs Reed would have absolutely no truck with all the nonsense, I can assure you. There is also zero chance that I will be putting myself through it again any time soon but I've certainly seen worse things this year and if you fancy a theatrical event, it's playing until Christmas and there are still plenty of seats available. And, you never know, maybe you'll be able to explain it all to me afterwards. 

The Duchess (of Malfi) - Most peculiar
Oedipus - Some fine acting indeed