Waiting for Godot (Leeds)

It’s a comment so famous that there was never any hope of its not appearing in the programme: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is “a play in which nothing happens, twice”. It’s clever and witty, containing truth, but not the whole truth – and therein lies the weakness and the triumph of this production by West Yorkshire Playhouse and Talawa Theatre Company.

The two acts of Waiting for Godot follow the same pattern. Vladimir and Estragon, possibly tramps, certainly outsiders, meet in a remote No Man’s Land just before nightfall, try to pass the time while waiting for Godot their mysterious benefactor/controller, have an encounter with Pozzo and his servant Lucky, then, when night falls, are told by a Boy that Godot will not come today, but surely tomorrow. However, the two acts are, in fact, very different. The theme is laid down in Act 1, Beckett gives us the variations in Act 2. That’s where we find the music-hall turns, the word games and the great speeches about the simultaneity of birth and death, as Beckett riffs on Act 1’s themes. The Pozzo/Lucky/Boy episodes are greatly accelerated in Act 2.

The idea of an all-black Waiting for Godot has to be a good one: deprived outsiders delivering musical non-standard English fits the Caribbean experience as much as the Irish which, despite the play’s French origins, always seems the default setting for Godot. However, in Act 1, Patrick Robinson’s Estragon and Jeffery Kissoon’s Vladimir are just a bit stagey: though Robinson’s facial comedy is always appealing, one is tempted to think of distinguished Shakespearean actors (which they are) slumming it. Ian Brown’s production takes too even a pace: Godot is not a slow play, but a quick-fire one with huge pauses! Pozzo proves problematic. The emblem of the squirearchy (perhaps, for Beckett, the Irish Protestant Ascendancy), he translates uneasily to the all-black situation, Cornell S. John’s heel-clicking, falsetto-ordering militarist not quite fitting. Guy Burgess’ superb delivery of Lucky’s single speech (English, not West Indian, white-face make-up – all very interesting!) ignites the production.

And Act 2 is a great example of what we go to the theatre for. Starting with the best version of the dog and kitchen song I’ve heard in some eight or ten Godot productions, it is pitch perfect throughout, very funny, very moving, ultimately very powerful. Pozzo, disempowered, is no longer a problem dramatically and John excels in his “One day...” speech. By the time Kissoon is talking of the forceps and the grave, the audience is as still as the stage action – and the final appearance of the Boy (Fisayo Akinade) produces a frisson I have not previously encountered.

- by Ron Simpson