Waiting for Godot - Malvern Theatres

Article by: Review by Chris Shepherd, English teacher at the Royal Grammar School, Worcester

There is a lovely bit in Waiting For Godot where the two tramps are hurling insults at each other. The worst insult Gogo can think of is ‘Critic!’ I smarted at that excoriation and imagined Beckett lurking in the wings, waiting for my review. There were howls of dismay when the play was first performed; but I know how unbeatable it can be, uncomfortable, even excruciating, but life-enhancing.

There has been a lot of hype about this production. It’s been everywhere, on the radio, in the papers and magazines. It has been billed as the theatre event of the year, and it is. In fact the theatre simmered with expectation, as the play was starting on its tour in Malvern. There was only one spare seat – next to mine.

Surprising perhaps, given the nature of this play? It is nihilistic, it seems an indictment of our lonely age where God has disappeared. It is a miserable howling at the moon, full of pathos and frustration and misery. Yet all it needs is a minimum of two, and preferably four, consummate actors, masters of their craft, and a good setting. And it had these in bucketfuls - Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Simon Callow, Ronald Pickup. Each one a fantastic interpreter of their characters, spinning off each other, extending the dialogue with gestures, shrugs, quirky expressions so that your heart was wrung.

Then the setting – an unbearably bleak ruined townscape – a Berlin in 1945, an immediately recognisable symbol of the devastation of the 20th century. A lone, bare tree broke through the floorboards, as if completing the destruction bombing had begun. A cold grey miserable light seemed to suggest snow, though the light changed with the time of day. The back wall was one huge brick devastation, and at the front of the stage a suggestion that this had been a theatre that had been bombed to bits, as two cold stone theatre boxes formed the sides of the set. It brought a chill to the bone and made it clear that our two tramps were remnants of a fallen civilisation.

All was cold, bleak, ruined, until Simon Callow’s Pozzo burst onto the stage. He was a caricature, dressed like a Ralph Caldicott squire with boots, yellow waistcoat, and amusing felt bowler; the symbol of a past class system. Lucky (Ronald Pickup) was snarling, embittered and cynical, acting the dog he was treated as.

It was a wonderful production, living up to its promise, making us weep at the nothingness and the melancholy of life: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ So why WAS there an empty seat next to me? See it if you can!

Waiting For Godot is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until July 12.