Waiting For Godot at the Barbican Theatre

Waiting for Godot is Samuel Beckett’s infamous play that has baffled, annoyed, and entranced the world of theatre. Some might call it pointless, while others might call it infinitely meaningful.  Every time one references this play, one also must remember Vivian Mercier’s famous critique: “…a play in which nothing happens, twice.”* The cyclical nature of the play, in which the second act mimics the first, sometimes even using the same lines, makes it one that is not everyone’s cup of tea. Reading it for the first time, I remember laughing to myself at the absurdity that this was considered one of the most ground-breaking plays of all time. Knowing I had the opportunity to see it performed in London made me take a closer look, and studying the play has made me fall in love with the deep, convoluted world that Beckett portrays, so pointlessly redundant yet at the same time infuriatingly familiar.

The big question that is often asked is whether this play is a comedy. As a matter of fact, Beckett includes in the title that this is a “Tragicomedy in two parts.” Which side is more prominent—the comedy or the tragedy? Having now both read and watched the play, I have to admit that I don’t necessarily have the answer (but as always, I’ll give you my best shot). Studying the work on the page, I initially found it extremely depressing. I did often chuckle at how bonkers the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon are, when they pull their almost Three Stooges-like slap-stick humor by making potty jokes or their routines of rapid back-and-forth dialogue, with one confusing the other while talking in circles (sort of a “Who’s on first” joke). Overall, however, what struck me were the moments of clarity, in which the characters made surprisingly deep observations about the world. One of my favorite lines from any play I have ever studied is Pozzo’s when he says, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” The idea that we are all born merely to die is obviously true but one that we hate to think about. Pozzo observes that the exact questions about time which Didi and Gogo keep asking him have little importance in the grand scheme of things, startling the audience back into seeing the sadness of their cyclical lives. To Didi and Gogo, who are stuck in an endless repetition of waiting for a mysterious person named Godot, time is so important yet also meaningless, since they have no idea how long they have really been waiting and will clearly continue to wait because they are unable to leave. Another line that stuck out to me when we watched the play was towards the beginning, when Didi tells Gogo, “There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet,” when Gogo is struggling to put on his too-tight shoes. Such lines like this, that truly grasp the nature of a human’s daily struggles, make the play deeply meaningful. Therefore, when reading some of the hokey one-line jokes, I failed to see the play as a comedy because I was so focused on the moments of insight.

Upon watching the play, I’m still a little undecided. In the week of class before we left for London, we saw a clip of Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan, which set the bar very high for a visual performance. The relationship between these two long-standing best friends brought to life what everyone has always mentioned about the play: the hopefulness of human relationships despite the drudgery of life. Even in the interview, Stewart and McKellan were perfect together, enhancing each other’s replies with the right comment here and there. Thus, when they made faces at each other onstage or paused at the right moments, I laughed hysterically. Finding the humor in this play through those two, I understood the fullness of a “tragicomedy.”

The Barbican version by the Sydney Theatre Company, which we saw last night, had me straddling the fence; I couldn’t quite get on board all the way. Though both the lead actors were obviously very talented and did a great job at delivering their own lines (Vladimir was played by Hugo Weaving), I lost a sense of the physical connection between the two together, which was key to my understanding of the play. For example, at one point, when Vladimir goes off on a tangent about the Bible and is explaining to Didi the death of the thief on the cross, he pauses and makes the comment “I hope I’m not boring you,” to which Didi makes a very sarcastic response. Unfortunately, Weaving went straight into his next line without giving Roxburgh (the actor who played Didi) an irritated look or exasperated pause. To me, it spoiled some of the connection which made the Stewart/McKellan version so endearing.

For most of the first act, I chuckled but never straight out laughed. Coming off the hysterical Book of Mormon, where I belly-laughed along with an entire audience, this was a little low on the energy level. The second act improved a great deal, and I laughed more often because I felt the actors really hit their stride. It also brought out more physicality, as one audience member pointed out in the talk-backs we had with the actors after the show, which had Didi, Gogo, Pozzo, and Lucky all end up on the floor on top of each other at one point. The audience really seemed to love this play. As I have heard someone say about theatre, audience members want to laugh at a show and always try to find the humor in a performance to alleviate some of the heavier subject matter. They were able to do this during jokes about stench (every time Didi picked up Gogo’s shoe, he flinched away from it) and bodily function routines (Didi has a problem with his genitals and it hurts him to use the bathroom). At these moments, the audience always laughed generously. I think this was a genuine reaction--for this audience, Waiting for Godot was absolutely a tragicomedy. Watching the play rather than reading it definitely emphasized the slap-stick humor and the unwritten funny moments that can only be felt when in an auditorium watching it performed.

All in all, though I felt the sadness of the play, I think it certainly can achieve both tragedy and comedy. The humor makes the depressing content more palatable. Furthermore, both the tenderness and the craziness of Didi and Gogo’s relationship is an important feature that points to the hope of enduring human legacies through love.