Waiting for Godot at Newcastle's Theatre Royal - he didn't turn up

Newcastle has now been added to my list of 'Cities I like'. I already knew I liked the place from a night-time visit last year, but having seen it in the daylight today, I like it even more. It's just really nice. Mostly. There are some tragedies of architecture there, but they're alongside some genuinely beautiful buildings. Wandering around the streets, I realised my friend and I were in danger of becoming architecture critics - this is bad, as we've no idea what we're talking about.

We were there to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Beckett's infamous Waiting for Godot, which I was wary of because I really wasn't a fan of the script. Here's my review:




Reading Waiting for Godot was – I admit – difficult. Not for nothing has Samuel Beckett's play been described as the one in which nothing happens...twice. Sean Mathias directs an eagerly-awaited production for the Theatre Royal Haymarket that tours this year – one that doesn't fail to live up to its promise.

When I read this seminal piece of theatre history a few months back, I suspected it was the sort of play that has to be seen to be properly understood. Having seen it, I still don't understand. But things are rather more clear. The comedy – gallows humour as it may at times be – is one thing to come out of seeing the thing staged.


But I'm still left with the impression that this play is a bit like candyfloss. You can pull bits away from the edges, working your way deeper and deeper, without actually gaining any extra value from it than what you had on the edges. Eventually – after stripping back the samey outside layer and the samey inner layers, you're left with a slightly baffling core, with which you can do nothing but look at and say “Er, yeah...well, that's it, then”.


But Mathias' production is stronger than my opinion of the writing implies. Leads Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were always going to be successes; the two classically trained actors pull off masterful performances as the vagabond double-act central to the non-action of Beckett's wandering script. Between them they handle a delicate mix of light-hearted buffoonery and existential glumness that is framed by Mathias' decision to make these tramps former thesps, continually re-meeting to wait for Godot. McKellen in particular draws laughter from his pathetic Estragon, seeming to be a child in an old man's body. Stewart's cleverer Vladimir, once his lines allow it, becomes a flustered child minder who is himself unsure of exactly what's going on.




But Simon Callow's Potzo is in danger of stealing the first act from under their noses. If the tramps are one-time actors, Potzo is a one-time circus ringmaster, brandishing his ineffectual whip at Ronald Pickup's hapless shell of a man, Lucky. Callow is all bombast and enforced bonhomie, exuberant in the power he wields. Pickup, meanwhile, loiters at the back until his frantic, manic, frenzied speech that culminates in his utter collapse.


Rather than focus on Beckett's image of humans being born 'astride the grave', ready to fall from cradle to death in a flash, this particular Waiting for Godot presents a humour not entirely expected in the bleakness. As well as that, there's the flicker of human nature that splutters into life every now and then. Our ability to wait and ponder is crucial, as is our tendency to miss opportunities we've spent ages waiting for. Beckett's limbo land makes these abstract things become very real. Language wanders back and forth, via half-remembered stories and events - all seeming to lead up to Potzo's final, reverberating, lines. But all the while, Beckett - as ever – is questioning our definitions of the world around us, what we believe to be true, and our very selves.


That Mathias' production makes this funny, charming yet also bleak is the key to its success. Tramps harking back to the old days of their (financial?) success feels horribly apt in the financial crisis of today.