‘Let’s go. Yes, let’s go’ (They do not move)
WAITING FOR GODOT is a play about waiting. Waiting for what never comes. Or what comes all too inevitably that it’s not worth waiting for. It waits for you.
It’s also a play about delay and the wasting of experience. The much anticipated, but coolly received, production of the play at the Haymarket Theatre, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Vladimir and Estragon, draws attention to its own performativity. The stage is a devastated theatre; broken floorboards and collapsed walls. A lone tree erupts towards the blinding moon.
Watching it last night I couldn’t help think of that other place of self-reflective staging and speaking to the masses: the Houses of Parliament. The frustrated, almost surreal, lack of action in WAITING FOR GODOT mirrors the slow-witted behaviour over the expenses scandal that has cost parliament so much, and Michael Martin his job.
As the rotund, stentorian Pozzo comes across the pair—with his servant Lucky at the end of his rope and the subject of his recrimination—I wondered if he had a moat and if so whether he would get Lucky to clean it. Probably.
Simon Callow over-indulged his part and marred an otherwise engaging repartee between the two stars, but that felt appropriate in a way too. Pozzo the character wouldn’t stand to be trumped by his fellow players, so why should Callow the actor roll over?
Lucky wasn’t so fortunate, yoked throughout and afforded one monologue to show his stripes, which was both heart-breaking and inconsequential. He is Pozzo’s intellectual superior, and in a sense his leader (especially when Pozzo is blinded in the second act), but he’s nothing but subordinate. A good citizen.
And just so the British electorate struggles on, in the front but under control. Parliament delays, assuring us with the first line of the play:
‘Nothing to be done’
