Waiting For Godot At The Stratford Festival
If you have seen Waiting For Godot by Samual Beckett as many times as I have, you approach each new one with trepidation. So it is with relief that I am able to report that director Molly Atkinson’s take on this classic at the Stratford Festival is good – damn good.
Two ragged tramps, Vladimir (Paul Gross) and Estragon (Tom McCamus) live along a road by a gnarled and leafless tree in a desolate landscape, sleeping in ditches where every night they are beaten by unknown thugs. They are waiting for Godot.
Spoiler alert: Godot never shows up, although he does send a young boy (Gordon Paul Miller and Asher Albert Waxman alternating) every evening to reassure Didi and Gogo (as they call one another) that he will certainly come tomorrow.
Into this seemingly never-ending life of misery marked by a desire to leave and a mysterious inability to do so, comes Pozzo (Jonathan Goad) and his slave Lucky (David W. Keeley).
The bombastic Pozzo, seemingly enjoying the prospect of spending time with fellow human beings, pauses for a frugal lunch, during which he calls on Lucky, whose inhuman bondage is nothing short of appalling, to entertain.
In one of the play’s most iconic moments, Lucky is commanded to “think” and thereupon launches into an extended soliloquy of nonstop gibberish. It can be a show stopper and so it proves here.
Eventually Pozzo and Lucky continue their journey only to return the next day, Pozzo now blind and in much reduced circumstances, with no memory of the previous day’s encounter. Once again Pozzo and Lucky leave, the boy returns with the same message, and the two tramps are left paralyzed with their inability to change their lot one iota.
Weird enough for you?
There is an informed body of opinion that holds Waiting For Godot to be the greatest play of the twentieth century. Maybe, but for my money Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece is surely in the top five.
Waiting For Godot is fascinating for another reason: It is being mounted constantly and a huge percentage of those productions are dreadful. I am fond of saying that Beckett done badly is the very definition of the word “excruciating.”
Yet, if you are fortunate to see an exemplary production of Godot the experience can be life-changing.
I can’t promise that Stratford’s production will change your life but I can assure you that you will see a more than creditable rendition of Beckett’s vision, whether you “understand” it or not.
Actually, I think that understanding Waiting For Godot is somewhat beside the point. Beckett never intended for the play to “mean” anything, at least in the conventional sense.
Alan Schneider, the director who introduced Beckett’s masterworks to America, wrote that when he asked Beckett who Godot was and what he represented, Beckett responded, “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.”
A lot of piffle has been written about what Waiting For Godot means, so let me toss in some piffle of my own.
John Milton said he wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man.” It occurs to me that all great plays, whether high tragedy or low comedy, do just that in that they somehow reconcile us to our shared humanity. For me, that’s what a solid production of Waiting For Godot, including this one, does for those who experience it.
There’s no denying that Waiting For Godot is a bleak play. The most quoted line belongs to Pazzo: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” Visions of human existence don’t much grimmer than that.
And yet Waiting For Godot is shot through with comedy and proves oddly uplifting. Surely there’s something admirable, even noble, about the way Didi and Gogo, and indeed all of us, persevere in the face of life’s absurdities.
But enough of my two-bit exegesis. What of this Waiting For Godot?
Atkinson has leaned into the comedy. This is one of the funniest Godot’s I can remember and Atkinson and her cast make the laughs perfectly organic, as opposed to shtick lathered on to make the existential medicine go down.
When I heard that this Godot would be staged in the vast confines of the Festival Theatre I was a bit taken aback. Waiting For Godot is usually performed in small theatres, lending the piece an almost claustrophobic quality. The best Godot I ever saw was presented in the round in a small Off-Broadway space.
So I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked in a large space. The play’s setting is, after all, a vast wasteland, so why not? Set designer Cory Sincennes had little to do other than erect a suitably artistic tree on Stratford’s iconic thrust stage stripped to its bare essentials.
The task of lighting designer Jareth Li was slightly more complex. I liked the way he used light to sketch in a road running from the upstage right exit to the downstage left vom. I also assume that he was responsible for the stunning projection that ends each act.
The cast is uniformly excellent. I must, however, single out McCamus. His Estragon is perfection, the best I have ever seen.
Goad brings impressive heft to Pozzo and the towering Keeley (the part usually goes to an actor of much slighter build) made a most intriguing Lucky.
Paul Gross brings his gift for light comedy to Vladimir, yet I could not help thinking that his movie-star good looks worked against him. Surely more could have been done to make him look as time-worn and ravaged as McCamus. They have, after all, been hanging out together for fifty years, or so the script tells us.
Sincennes (who also handled the costumes) has given Estragon a perfectly wonderful set of rags. Vladimir’s outfit, by comparison, looks positively elegant and nowhere near as threadbare as it should be.
Speaking of Gross’ star power, this Waiting For Godot is being offered for a mere 24 performances. Perhaps the thinking was that Waiting For Godot is such a poor draw that this was all the traffic could bear. I strongly expect that this truncated run reflects the busy schedules of marquee names like Gross.
Too bad. I would like to think that the good word of mouth this production will almost assuredly receive will drive more interest in seeing the show. As it is, the Festival is only selling orchestra seats. You can only get a seat in the balcony if you specifically request one.
Waiting For Godot continues at the Stratford Festival through July 31, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Stratford Festival website.
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