Waiting for Whishaw: Waiting For Godot, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London

My first exposure to a Samuel Beckett play. Whilst I’d heard of the one where he buries a woman up to her neck in earth and creates a monologue and was vaguely aware of Godot, I had no idea what I was about to expose myself to. Sensory overload — it’s kind of an assault on the senses. As an audience, we experience confusion, time passing, disorientation, discomfort and disturbance, compassion and pity, banality and boredom. We wait with the waiters for an unknown outcome — which never occurs.

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It would be easy to watch this play and come away going ‘ whaaat?’ Truly anyone who watches this for the first time benefits from a bit of background research before hand or reading the programme. It was only as I read the programme that the play started to make sense. Written immediately after World War Two (originally in French) this play memoralises and reflects the state of the World at the end of the War in Europe. My new fun fact is that Beckett was a member of the French Resistance, and after they were betrayed went into hiding. He knew, like the main characters, the banality, frustration and emotion of waiting for something to happen, of wanting to leave and not being able to, of watching, of time passing seemingly without end, of going through and coming out of a terrible period of history wondering if it was merely going to cycle through again. Things happen with fragmentary information — we encounter brutality, cruelty, suffering, disconnection, irrational lashing out, the unexpected and also compassion, care, tenderness.

With hints of the many dead and displaced in the background, the Holocaust, Beckett confronts us with ‘all the corpses — where did they come from? Was I sleeping?’ No wonder the characters never want each other to share their dreams, it’s the stuff of nightmares. But mostly this is Beckett saying ‘has anything changed inspite of the victory, the defeat of enemies, the immense suffering? Or is it all just still the same and going to repeat itself again?’

However, if you don’t know any of this watching it — it merely feels odd, a bit like watching Filthy Rich and Cat Flap as characters torment each other (perhaps for comedy) and without purpose or meaning. Even boring at points. I’ll admit I was hoping that that Act 1 was the end, and I did find the play boring at points. I found the relentless random cruelty of people towards each other hard to watch, and the audience laughing at Lucky’s painful treatment. Indeed, it would be easy to laugh heartlessly all the way through as everything seems ridiculous, absurd, foolish, disorientating, meaningless and pointless. A pair of boots are removed because they hurt — then they get stolen and replaced with new boots. Does this even matter who did this or why? Are we merely reactive goldfish in life?

We’re in a slanted moonscape of a field, with a barren tree in the centre. Everything is concrete grey. Two characters sit waiting for Godot — disrupted by the arrival of an elite character who has enslaved his servant, at the end of a rope, speaks of him as sub-human, orders him about to wait on him and is very, very jollily entitled. Even oppressive. Occasionally a boy (or his brother) arrive with messages from Godot about how he’s not keeping the longed for appointment today — ‘try again tomorrow’… The two characters ponder about leaving, separating, not coming back — but they do.

Tom Edden as the very unlucky Lucky, though laughed at as ridiculous, moved me to compassion and pity. I felt so tender towards him in his sufferings, the observed rope welt marks on his neck. And this is Tom Edden’s genius, he turns the stumbling, bumbling, decaying and decrepit servant into a human, a figure of vulnerability. Once he could dance fantastically, now he can only remember stumbling steps of each. Gove him his hat, and he never stops pontificating! At the same time why doesn’t he rise up, rebel, escape?

Jonathan Slinger as the elite ‘huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ picnicin’ Pozzo expects others to do everything for him. He’s used to giving orders and being obeyed to his comfort. His social and cultural blindness becomes physical — and rather than having his servant wait on him, he has to be led. The kindness with which Lucky helps his master was moving. Though at the same time, our two main characters were both fearful of Lucky lashing out at helpers, and disturbed by Pozzo’s abrupt, indefinable change from optimism to focused coldness.

Also it’s about what we’re noticing. Characters wonder if there is meaning to their world, their lives, their waiting. Where is God in all of this? (Literally where is Godot and when is he coming back?) Real Primo Levy questions here. They peer out at the moon, across the fields, hide from Lucky’s loquaciousness, insult each other as a time-filler, give an oppressive overlord back his whip. Do our actions and words have meaning, any lasting impact? Do they matter? Should we even bother? The tree sprouts leaves in the desolate landscape in the second act — is this hopeful? Or is it just a random act? It all feels a bit like Job under the fig tree…waiting, waiting…

Surreal and baffling, it’s also a very spiritual play. If we observe others fallen, will we help or merely observe their suffering and look on? If we see someone enslaved and loaded down with bags, obviously mistreated by an overlord — will we intervene or merely talk about what we can see? We will let the same old ways continue? The same injustices? Will we allow others to help us or will we lash out in cruelty? In observing cruelty towards others, do we just mimic it when we get the opportunity? As things appear to go on in the same old ways, will we hurt and inflict violence and cruelty on each other, deliberately refuse to stand so that others have to carry us, leave other sprawled on the ground — or we will do things differently? What will we choose as we continue to wait? How we will relate to those we deem ‘other’? Are wars and suffering merely a distraction to pass the time as we wait (such as Lucky and Pozzo’s appearances) or are they a wake up call for us — and a call to social and personal responsibility and action? Do we actually want and need someone to come from outside and save us?

Truly this is the first play I’ve gone into where you really have to know the background, the playwright’s intentions behind it all. At the same time, Ben Whishaw as Vladmir and Lucian Msamati as Estragon lighten the mood by doing the best hat sequence swop ever.

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