Reviews West End & Central Published 8 June 2015

Waiting for Godot

Barbican Theatre ⋄ 4th-13th June 2015

Desperate hope.

Neil Dowden

As part of this month’s International Beckett Season at the Barbican, Sydney Theatre Company have revived their 2013 production of Waiting for Godot. And 60 years on since this iconic play was first staged in this country it has lost none of its power to provoke, puzzle, amuse and move.  The tropes of Beckett’s theatrical landscape may have become much more familiar to us but this absurdist tragicomedy in which ‘nothing happens, twice’ still seems timelessly relevant to the human predicament.

Andrew Upton’s entertaining production certainly passes the time quickly (though it would have passed anyway), with much emphasis on the play’s debt to music-hall humour and silent film comedy. Vladimir and Estragon’s banter and slapstick while waiting for the elusive Godot resembles a vagrant double act on the scrap heap clowning about in order to fend off boredom and anxiety, where even talk about hanging themselves is played for gallows humour. There’s a lot of comic business in this highly physical interpretation, like an existentialist version of Laurel and Hardy, swapping battered hats and horsing around in their ill-fitting, bedraggled suits.

But more tenderly they also resemble an old married couple who bicker, sulk and make up, with ‘Didi’ playing the comforter and ‘Gogo’ the more vulnerable one, in a touching display of mutual emotional dependence. They might get annoyed with each other and talk about leaving, but they both know that in the end it is only their companionship that keeps them going in a world devoid of feature or meaning, where one day succeeds another in monotonous anonymity. The visually arresting arrival of the whip-cracking Pozzo and his hapless porter Lucky shows a more abusive, if ambivalent, relationship. This production may seem a bit too cosy at times and not plumb the depths of Beckett’s stark metaphysical vision, but any transient comfort is always fringed by a sense of unease.

Hugo Weaving’s bearded Vladimir, the more patient and philosophical of the pair, has a touch of gentlemanly elegance in his speech and movement, contrasting with Richard Roxburgh’s pessimistic and disgruntled Estragon, who is near the end of his tether – and they bounce of each other with a real feeling of warmth. Philip Quast’s booming, flamboyant Pozzo is a larger-than-life figure later pathetically cut down to size as he becomes totally dependent on Luke Mullins’s long-suffering but surprisingly strong Lucky, in a role reversal that sees him willingly pull the shortened rope between them as the mute leads the blind.

Designer Zsolt Khell’s dilapidated proscenium arch echoes the metatheatricality of a play that involves so much game-playing, though stunted tree stumps, crumbling brickwork and a blackened back wall suggest a much darker, even post-apocalyptic scenario in which survivors while away their ennui in desperate hope of salvation. And Nick Schlieper’s tangential lighting draws out a long shadow from the sole living tree slenderly stretching above into eternity, before bluish night-time takes over, and then blackout.

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Neil Dowden

Neil's day job is working as a freelance editor for book publishers such as HarperCollins, Penguin, Faber and British Film Institute Publishing, but as a night person he prefers reviewing for Exeunt. He has also written features on the theatre and reviewed films, concerts, albums, opera, dance, exhibitions, books and restaurants for various newspapers and magazines, including The Stage and What's On in London, as well as contributing to a couple of books on 20th-century drama and writing a short tourist guide to London for Visit Britain. He insists he is not a playwright manqué but was born to be a critic and just likes sticking a knife into luvvies. In fact, as a boy he wanted to become a professional footballer, but claims there were no talent scouts where he then lived on the South Wales coast, and so has had to settle for playing Sunday league for a dodgy south London team. Apart from the arts and sport, his other main interest is travel, and he is never happier than when up a mountain, though Everest Base Camp is the highest he has been so far. He believes he has not yet reached his peak.

Waiting for Godot Show Info


Directed by Andrew Upton

Cast includes Luke Mullins, Philip Quast, Richard Roxburgh, Hugo Weaving, Harrison Donnelly

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