Waiting for Godot with Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw – West End review

It’s almost seventy years since the 1955 premiere of Waiting for Godot in Britain, when it was greeted with boredom and incomprehension. Yet in this new production starring Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw as the two tramps Estragon and Vladimir, Samuel Beckett’s first masterpiece gleams more brightly than ever.

The key to Godot lies in finding and holding a balance between its bright comedy and its dark, philosophical hues. Director James Macdonald unlocks its tensions with perfect poise, letting its seriousness and sadness emerge but also filling it with a surprising amount of love.

Two excellent programme essays emphasise the way that when Beckett wrote Godot in 1948-9 (first performed in 1953), he was still close to his experiences of the Second World War in which he had been involved in the French resistance – and in which many of his friends were tortured and died. The misery conjured in his play, the violence that it shows, the hunger and the waste, were all things he had experienced.

Yet the greatness of the work is that it both reflects and transcends that suffering, making its central figures witnesses and victims, waiting for a salvation that never quite appears, but continuing to survive, to endure and to strive as day follows endless day and there’s “nothing to be done”.

Here, when the blue safety curtain rises, the slope of Rae Smith’s set, barren like a lunar landscape or the aftermath of war, actually revolves into place, emphasising the endless, circular nature of Didi and Gogo’s days. Msamati’s Gogo sits to one side, pulling on a boot. Whishaw’s Didi stands under a barren, silver tree, tattered plastic hanging from its bare branches, gazing upwards into a dark sky.

The tramps are very much homeless men, in a tattered assortment of dirty, ill-fitting clothes quite different from the big coats and matching hats worn by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen when they took on the play at this same venue in 2009.  They’re not clowns, but the theatricality of the work is preserved by the way characters gaze out into the audience at moments, implicating us and our moral decisions in the “charnel house” the world has created.

Both production and actors beautifully differentiate the two men. Msamati’s Gogo, with trousers falling down and a hat with fur flaps, is a grounded pragmatist, while Whishaw’s Didi, constantly pulling his bobble hat on and off his head, seems to float around like a skinny philosopher, ankles crossed, arms folded, thoughtful finger to his twitching lips.  With exquisite timing, they find new ways through familiar lines – Whishaw’s little pauses, Msamati’s ironic flatness – making the language poetic and musical, but always naturalistic.

It’s a remarkable piece of tightrope walking and it lets them illuminate the richness of thought that runs through the play, subject of a thousand theses, but feeling new minted. They also constantly convey, by little touches and glances, the affection and closeness of the two men. They might threaten to leave one another, they might even believe they would be better off alone, but they are tied to one another by bonds of knowledge and need.

When their daily routine of waiting for Godot – a phrase they never utter with the same intonation twice – is interrupted by the arrival of another symbiotic couple, the master Pozzo (a seething, ferocious and urbane Jonathan Slinger, dressed like a country squire) and his slave Lucky (Tom Edden, dazzling and harrowing both in the comedy of his silence and his one, torrential outburst of words), they cling together conspiratorially, trying to weigh up what to do.

When the couple reappear in the second act, with Pozzo now blind and Lucky dumb, McDonald plays up the physical comedy of the quartet’s collapse on stage, turning their movements into a kind of dance of chaos, the events and their words passing the time, staving off despair.

The passage of time is one of Beckett’s main preoccupations in this purgatory where nothing is remembered and nothing remains and Bruno Poet’s lighting marks the descent from day to night in cool tones, a rich red changing the landscape only when the Boy arrives to announce the non-arrival of Godot.

The entire production has that same clarity and thoughtfulness, a way of shining a spotlight on Beckett’s language and philosophy in ways that make it both profoundly funny and infinitely sad, that force you to listen and consider. Wonderful.