Long awaited, unsurpassable Godot

You might wonder how I could possibly state the above when I've never encountered Samuel Beckett's poleaxing masterpiece on stage before (Happy Days, on the other hand, I've seen four times with three different protagonists, all superb). Others can be different but not better. Certainly theatre critics who have seen multiple Godots claims James Macdonald's production is far and away the finest. I just know that I could never laugh more than at the double act of Lucian Msamati's Estragon and Ben Whishaw's Vladimir when it goes into semi vaudeville overdrive in Act Two - where there's something about Whishaw's 'this is becoming so...insignificant' that neardly made me fall off my seat - or be more gripped than by the strangeness of Tom Edden's sudden stirring into semi-gibberish speech as Lucky, waxing ever more resonant and apocalyptic (pictured below left before breaking the silence with Jonathan Slinger's equally good Pozzo  - the whole cast, boy messenger included, is superb).  I wondered where I'd seen that bug-eyed look before: Edden was the laugh-until-you-cry-funny waiter in One Man, Two Guvnors.

I was thinking 'tragi-comedy' throughout, and when I got back to read the text in my complete Beckett book, I found that was exactly how he'd defined it. The two excellent articles in the programme, by James Knowlson, Emeritus Professor of French at Reading University, and Fintan O'Toole, who should need no introduction, on cultural and political contexts many have denied, give us many reasons why this feels so real and yet dreamlike at the same time. Tight, ill-fitting boots, sleeping in a ditch, longing for the relative comfort of a hay-filled loft, charnel houses, brutality: Beckett had known or been made aware of them all as a Resistance agent of the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War, when he would have been shot if caught like so many of his colleagues. And the artistic references Knowlson pinpoints are startling.

His special genius is to mythologise all this, to hint at so much without hammering it home as too many contemporary playwrights do. His characters are not types, though - they're so recognisably human and individual. Whishaw's special, aerial charm and Msamati's more earthbound curmudgeonliness compliment each other to perfection. They leave enough space for you to come out of the theatre reflecting on the play's relationship to what you know and have experienced. There can be no higher compliment. 

True ensembles like this make nonsense of 'Best Actor' awards - Msamati and Whishaw need to share it, as do Thomas Coombes and Paapa Essiedu as the two one-act masters in the Death of England trilogy. It's been such a rich three-day sequence: this followed by the Bernstein double bill at the Royal Opera's Linbury Theatre and then a rigorous but also emotionally engaging production of Britten's The Turn of the Screw at English National Opera. But Godot was the ultimate revelation for me. 

Footnote (23/10) - I've just seen Krapp's Last Tape in Dublin starring Stephen Rea. Says nothing to me at all (nor did it when we regretted spending so much money on John Hurt's performance in London). I wouldn't even know what to write by way of review; as I went as my partner's guest, I'm not obliged to do so. The difference, I guess, is that in Godot and Happy Days humanity fights against the void; here it's already given up.

Production images by Manuel Harlan