'Waiting For Godot' (Druid Theatre Company)

As frequent ROTters will know, I consider Waiting for Godot one of the most important plays of the 20th century—perhaps the single most important work of Western theater.  It confused many viewers, both theater pros and general audiences, when it first hit the stages of Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, and many dismissed it.  But it changed everything that came after.  Western theater has never been the same.  Just the week after I saw a new staging of Godot, I saw the revival of a 2004 play, Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno, who was described at its U.S première in the New York Times as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”

I don’t get to see all the new productions of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, but I go to as many as I can manage, so when my friend Diana called over the summer to tell me that coming to the 2018 Lincoln Center White Light Festival was a production of the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, one of whose previous productions I’d seen six years ago (Famine by Tom Murphy, part of the three-play series DruidMurphy presented at the Lincoln Center Festival that summer; see my post on 24 July 2012), I jumped at the chance.  We booked seats at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on West 59th Street for the 7:30 performance on Friday evening, 9 November.

The Druid’s presentation of Waiting for Godot ran from 2 to 13 November 2018.  Previously, the production ran at the company’s home theater in Galway from 22 February to 3 March 2018 and then toured Ireland, playing Limerick, Letterkenny, Dublin, Cork, Longford, Wexford, Dún Laoghaire, and Sligo.  Before coming the New York’s White Light Festival, the Druid’s Godot appeared at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (17 April–20 May), the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (23 May-3 June), and the Edinburgh International Festival (3-12 August); the production also made a return trip to Druid’s hometown for the Galway International Arts Festival (7–23 July).  (The explanation for the very short run at the home theater, a scant 10 days, is director Garry Hynes’s “very low expectations,” according to actor and former columnist for Back Stage Michael Kostroff.  “We very deliberately scheduled it for a very short run in our own 100-seat theater,” said the director, “so that if we fell on our ass with it there weren’t going to be too many people around to watch the damage.”  The evidence is that they didn’t stumble—not by a longshot.)

The White Light Festival, now in its ninth year, is Lincoln Center’s annual exploration of music and art’s power to reveal the many dimensions of our interior lives.  International in scope, the multidisciplinary festival offers a broad spectrum of the world’s leading instrumentalists, vocalists, ensembles, choreographers, dance companies, and directors complemented by conversations with artists and scholars and post-performance White Light Lounges. The festival will occupy six venues in the Lincoln Center area to present more than a dozen events.  “This year,” says Jane Moss, festival director, “we focus on what it means to be human in an increasingly fractious world—a world where communication, compassion, and creative expression remain vital to our survival as a global community.”  The festival takes its name from a quotation by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): “I could compare my music to white light, which contains all colors.  Only a prism can divide the colors and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”  

(For background on the Druid Theatre Company, see my report on Famine, referenced above; for a short bio of Samuel Beckett, see the report on the last production of Godot I saw, performed at New York University’s Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts three years ago by Gare St Lazare Ireland, posted on 31 October 2015 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2015/10/waiting-for-godot.html].  See my report on While I Was Waiting, posted on Rick On Theater on 1 August 2017, for a brief profile of the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.  There is more detailed information on the playwright and his absurdist tragi-comedy in “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot” and “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 and 3 April 2009.)

There’s really no plot in Godot, of which Irish Times reviewer Vivian Mercier said in 1956, it’s “a play in which nothing happens, twice.”  (That wasn’t a put down.  Mercier went on to exclaim that it nevertheless “keeps audiences glued to their seats.”)  Of course, Beckett says so himself: One of his characters declares, “Nothing happens.  Nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”  I describe the events of the play in my report on the 2015 Godot).  In brief, act one presents Estragon (Aaron Monaghan, short and stocky), called Gogo (already on stage before the lights come up), and Vladimir (tall, thin, and rangy Marty Rea), known as Didi, as they wait for a man called Godot—who famously never comes.  A study in absurdist co-dependency.  The two wayfarers, obviously once refined men now down on their luck, occupy themselves with various time-passing activities—the French title of the play, the version Beckett wrote first, is En attendant Godot, which translates as “While waiting for Godot”—until they meet Pozzo (Rory Nolan) and Lucky (Garrett Lombard, looking like a Noh white lion character in hobo drag) passing through the barren landscape with one, lone, leafless tree.  Pozzo is the master, the slave-holder, the man of importance; Lucky is his mostly mute, cowed menial whom Pozzo leads by a long rope around his neck.  After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy (Jaden Pace at the performance I saw; he alternates with Nathan Reid) arrives to tell Gogo and Didi that Godot will not come today, but surely tomorrow. 

In act two, the same events occur, though Pozzo and Lucky are traveling in the opposite direction and Pozzo has had a change of fortune: he’s now blind.  After the travelers leave, the boy comes again with the same message.  Indeed, a play of little action, in the strictest sense as Aristotle or Stanislavsky would define it—but riveting and eternally revealing.  At two hours and 30 minutes in length, the performance seems to zoom by and I sat, as I have at other performances of Waiting for Godot since I first saw it as a college freshman in 1965, engrossed and mesmerized, listening afresh to Beckett’s words, hearing them again for the first time. 

It doesn’t make much sense for me to review Beckett’s play again (see what I said in the Gare St Lazare report); I haven’t changed my mind about it.  Each time I see Waiting for Godot, I become more certain that my first impression was absolutely correct and really great productions confirm that opinion in spades.  The Druid staging qualifies as great; even Diana extolled it enthusiastically, including a week later when she and I met to see the Thom Pain revival at the Signature Theatre Company (report forthcoming).  It was magnificent!  Possibly the best Godot I’ve seen so far.  (I’m leaving room for future productions, but I’d be surprised that any surpass the Druid’s.)  I also repeat what I said in 2015 about providing an interpretation of the play: There are so many, and they get so complex that it would be bootless to attempt one here—so I won’t.  (Interested readers can find some discussion of the play’s meaning(s) in the two 2009 articles I mentioned above.)

None of the cast are stars over here (though they all appeared in 2012’s Famine, which was also helmed by Hynes), so this wasn’t a bravura performance, but an excellent ensemble that revealed some things in the play I’d never noticed before (or maybe forgotten).  At 2½ hours (including intermission), it just zipped by without lags or slow-downs.  Oh, and it’s funny, too—often hilarious, with music hall gags and classic comic turns, all executed with alacrity by the Mutt and Jeff of Beckettworld, pratfalls from the portly Pozzo, and Lucky’s insane “thinking” on command (which received enthusiastic applause from the audience) that comes off like Professor Irwin Corey on acid (assuming, of course, that Corey wasn’t already on acid).  The White Light audience was especially receptive to the humor, both low and highbrow.

In that other Irish production of Godot in 2015, I don’t recall the Irish dialect featuring so prominently in the performance.  (I checked my report and I never mentioned an accent.)  Here, Rea’s Didi and Monaghan’s Gogo both use it, which makes Beckett’s lines absolutely musical.  (That alone made me notice some lines on which I haven’t focused before.  I was particularly struck with Gogo’s realization, “Everything oozes.  It’s never the same pus from one minute to the next” because it’s a grotesque restatement of a key term of Heraclitus of Ephesus, one of Beckett’s principal philosophical sources, who said: “Everything flows.”  One cannot place the same foot in the same stream a second time, the classic Greek philosopher explained, because neither the foot nor the stream is by then the same.)  It was truly beautiful just to listen to!  Interestingly, Nolan’s Pozzo is more English in his speech than Rea/Didi and Monaghan/Gogo, which adds a level of political commentary (which I suspect Beckett didn’t intend, but which isn’t intrusive and is even titillating):  Pozzo, the slave-master, the autocrat, the self-important bully, is English, literally throwing bones to the two Irish wayfarers—who, in this production, are clearly once-prosperous gentlemen who’ve fallen low (rather than just tramps or even tramp-clowns à la Emmett Kelly, as they were in the Gare St Lazare rendering). (For the record, young Pace is an American actor and was not made to affect an accent, either English or Irish.)

Overall, the acting and production were superb.  None of the roles (even the boy) is easy, and I can tell you from my own brief experience as an actor that plays like Beckett’s, Absurdist and anti-realistic scripts, are harder than even Shakespeare or the Greeks.  Maybe the artistic challenge puts everyone on his acting toes, but for whatever reason, the Druid company’s Waiting for Godot was a showcase.  As absurd (lower case) as the stage life is, these actors all made it look perfectly reasonable—within the world of Beckett and Godot.  If you’ll allow me to make a crass analogy, it’s a lot like watching the films of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings: we know those worlds don’t really exist, but for the span of the movie, we believe they do and all the people who live in them behave in accordance with the rules, forces, and environments of those snow globes.  That’s what Monaghan, Rea, Nolan, Lombard, and Pace all have to do—and accomplish seamlessly.  I suspect it’s easier to do in the Star Wars or Ring movies because, first, of all the technical assistance the filmmakers have on call and, second, they don’t have to do it live in front of an audience.  They also don’t have to keep it up for 2½ hours, eight performances a week.  

(I have no evidence for this, but I have a feeling that, while most actors and directors who do Shakespeare or Shaw or Molière or Mamet or Hansberry do it because the think the plays are good or important, they do Waiting for Godot because they love it.  Oh, sure, most directors and actors have favorite Shakespeares or Shaws—I love Much Ado About Nothing and The Man of Destiny, for instance—but an entire cast of Hamlet lovers?  Probably not.  But Godot?  I bet if you polled the casts and directors of every major production of that play, you’ll find that almost everyone involved signed on out of love for the play.  Just a feeling.)

Hynes’s staging is more physical than many I’ve seen—not just in the sight gags, which are generally played for laughs, but in the constant business in which Gogo and Didi engage.  (Remember, the point of the play is what the two men do while they’re waiting for Godot.  It’s not about the waiting; it’s about passing the time during the waiting.)  All four of the main actors, Monaghan, Rea, Nolan, and Lombard, are superb physical performers, especially Monaghan and Rea, and Gogo, Didi, and Pozzo always seem to be in motion in some way or another, even if they’re just vibrating or swaying.  Waiting for Godot isn’t a play about activity or motion, yet Hynes’s version seemed right nonetheless.  The difference is that these wanderers don’t wait inactively or motionlessly; for them, waiting is an action.

Designer Francis O’Connor’s conception of Beckett’s “A country road.  A tree.” is a flat, arid space (no road as such) with a leafless tree shaped like a gigantic divining rod pointing at the ground—as if signaling that whatever the travelers are looking for, this is where to search—and an egg-shaped rock, smooth, white, and oval, where Didi and (especially) Gogo sit when they’re not bouncing around the bleached terrain.  It’s not a claustrophobic or confining place, but there’s nothing here to recommend it as a good place to wait.  It’s still a prison, albeit without walls—after all, Didi and Gogo can’t escape it; they may leave, but they always come back.  The whole set, though, is enclosed by a color-changing lighted frame that sets a mysterious boundary around this little world.  From the way Didi and Gogo look out into the distance in either direction, striking a cartoon sailor’s searching posture—one foot thrust way back, torso leaning as far forward as physically possible, and one hand shading the eyes for better viewing—it’s clear that as bare as the waiting place is, the landscape all around the two is even emptier. 

Lit by James F. Ingalls with shades of white light, bright during the day, dim at night, but with no visible color, the gray cyclorama that stands in for the sky is as characterless as the land.  At night, a balloon-like moon floats in from the stage-left wing (reminding me somewhat of Rover, the menacing balloon guard that prevented prisoners from escaping The Village in the ’60s British TV series The Prisoner).

O’Connor’s dress for Didi and Gogo makes obvious that they aren’t the baggy-pants clowns of the Gare St Lazare production and not quite “gentlemen of the road,” but once-successful men of some affluence who’ve fallen on hard times.  The clothing also seems to enhance the physical contrast of the two wanderers.

Show-Score based its review survey on 21 notices, but the site included 10 reviews of performances in Ireland, Washington, and Chicago.  Based only on the ratings for the 11 New York City reviews, the average score was 85, with a top score of 97 (Show Showdown) followed by a 95 (Exeunt magazine) and a low score of 70 (TheaterScene.net), backed by a 75 (New York Times).  All the published reviews tallied by Show-Score (100%) were positive.  I’ll survey nine reviews for my round-up.

In the New York Times, the only newspaper to cover the White Light’s Godot, Ben Brantley began his review by asking, “Have you ever paused to consider the spiritual and physical affinities between the desolate universe of Samuel Beckett and the wacky world of vintage Warner Brothers cartoons?”  Well, I never have, and Brantley acknowledged that he hadn’t, either.  “Or at least not until I saw the Druid Theatre’s production of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot.’”  Calling the production “highly stylized and very funny” in his 75-rated notice, the Timesman confessed, “I found myself transported to Saturday mornings with Looney Tunes from my childhood,” adding, “Little did I know then, as I chuckled over the frantic antics of Daffy and Bugs and company, that I was taking an extended course in existential futility.”  Among the parallels with the universe of cartoons, Brantley pointed out “the sense that no matter how hard and cruel the day has been, those who lived through it are ready to begin the same old punishing routine the next morning” and, perhaps most pointedly, “the suspicion, which freezes into certainty, that those who work so ardently to achieve their elusive goals will never, ever be rewarded: not Wile E. Coyote in pursuit of the fleet Road Runner, nor Sylvester the Cat, hungry eyes forever trained on the unreachable Tweety Bird.”  The same, he observed, is true of Vladimir and Estragon. 

In addition to their “vaudevillian and music-hall-clown nature,” Brantley found that “the improbably elastic pair of Aaron Monaghan (Gogo) and Marty Rea (Didi) float them into the stratosphere of the Looney Tunes menagerie.”  The Times reviewer pronounced the production “one of the most accessible, and enjoyable, ‘Godots’ on record.  It’s lively and sensibly silly enough to take a child to, at least for its first act.”  He affirmed, “Every one of the jokes, in all their fugue-like repetition, lands solidly.  And lines to which I’ve never paid much attention before stand out in illuminated relief.” 

“What you may find yourself missing,” Brantley lamented, “is the deeply touching familiarity of Gogo and Didi’s relationship, a portrait of marriage of sorts, in which interdependence is mixed with impatience and irritability.”  (I’m not so sure this co-dependency was lacking.  Another reviewer said of the Edinburgh International Festival that the relationship was like that of a father with a toddler.)  He found the production’s “comic exaggeration can feel a bit distancing.”  “Still,” wrote the reviewer, “I can’t imagine a better introduction than this lucid and entertaining cartoon of a show.”

Emily Nemens declared in the Paris Review, “The Galway-based company knows its Beckett, . . . nailing not only the dialogue but those strange stage directions, bowler hat blowing and all.”  Nemens continued, “By the end of the two acts, I felt like I’d known Gogo and Didi . . . for many more moons than the two that rise onstage—it’s a testament to the pair’s ability to perform the challenging script, which is at once existentially wrought and physically demanding.  Both are taken to their logical extremes with the actors’ emphatic delivery (there are squeaks, whispers, shouts) and physical feats (there’s a good moment of shoe-tugging that looks more like partners’ yoga).”  Sympathizing with Gogo and his sore feet because she’d injured her own, the Paris reviewer asserted that “the strange sense of urgency wrapped in never-ending limbo that compels Beckett’s play is bigger than my busted pinkie toe.  It echoes across the ‘muddy’ scenery and into all of our lives.”

In the review with the highest rating from Show-Score, a 97, Wendy Caster labeled the Druid production of Godot “superb” on Show Showdown and proclaimed it “damn close to perfect.”  Caster felt, “Garry Hynes’s meticulous direction exquisitely balances the pain and humor of Beckett’s heartbreakingly funny play.”  She even found parallels between “the rich bully Pozzo, full of bluster and in desperate need of constant flattery”  and our “45th president,” making the  play hit “particularly hard this time around.”  The Show Showdowner affirmed, “Everyone affiliated with the production provides top-notch work,” adding a “special tip of the hat to movement director Nick Winston, whose work deliciously blends clowning and grace.” 

In her review which scored a 95 on Show-Score, Exeunt magazine’s Ran Xia made a painterly reference to set the tone of her notice and the play: “The color scheme recalls Rembrandt, but the aesthetics are full Magritte: making something tragic-sad into whimsy.”  (I have to quote Xia’s next remark—because it could be me saying this; in fact, I did say it: “Waiting for Godot has always been one of my favorite plays.  It is a pretty much flawless script.  Over the years I’ve seen a fair share of topnotch productions and with each one I see, I hear something new and realize something fresh to unpack.”)  The Exeunt reviewer further declared, “Never have I experienced Waiting for Godot in such a brand new way than I did with director Garry Hynes’ interpretation,” adding that the Druid rendition “is by far the funniest version I’ve seen.”  She affirmed, “The result is deeply satisfying.  It galvanizes an unsettling, surreal, and entertaining version of Godot.” 

Xia, like me, was taken with the language of the Druid staging of Godot.  “The poetry of this production is built in in a macro way.  The rhythm of the language is stylized, but accessible; it treats every word with care, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously.”  I attributed this in large part of the Irish English spoken by actors Monaghan and Rea.  Xia makes a somewhat similar judgment, finding that “the performers’ Irish lilts . . . grounds the language in a kind of naturalism that cannot be achieved with an American or British accent.”  She even draws a  conclusion from the fact that Pozzo, Lucky, and the boy don’t use Irish accents: “this further accentuates the ‘otherness’ of Estragon and Vladimir.”  Xia’s concluding assessment of Druid’s Waiting for Godot is quite personal:

Godot has always made me cry, but Druid’s version made me laugh harder than I ever have before.  It later became the most unsettling too, in a satisfying way.  I’ve heard it said that the purpose of theatre is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.  I see Waiting for Godot as the epitome of that.

The website New York Stage Review posted two reviews of Godot.  In one, David Finkle asserted that Beckett’s play is “the great play of the 20th century” and affirmed that “nothing done in Garry Hynes’ production . . . makes me think otherwise.  If anything, it substantiates and enhances my opinion.”  Finkle’s colleague Michael Sommers found that the “Druid theater company . . . delivers a very fine staging of Waiting for Godot that lends the play a glowing sense of humanity.”  He reiterated, “The production . . . presents a truly radiant interpretation of Beckett’s challenging work.”  Sommers remarked extensively on “the natural quality of [the] easy rapport” of Monaghan’s Estragon and Rea’s Vladimir, feeling that their “personal warmth and vitality . . . brightens the existential desolation of Beckett’s classic.”  In addition, “Somehow they are able to be as funny as they are poignant, and that’s quite an achievement.”  Sommers also comments on the Irish accents of the performers, which he felt “underscore the musical quality of Beckett’s dialogue and point up its Irish rhythms.”  Overall, the cyber-reviewer concluded, Hynes “successfully infuses Beckett’s bleak study in existence with a warm, wonderful sense of humor and eternal life.”

On Broadway World, Adam Cohen asserted, “The production excels at finding the humor in the mundane; it pierces with a gracious, poignant truth of friendship” and the director “mines the piece for its quiet moments and visceral existential angst and vaudeville farce.  She firmly redefines our notion of tragic daily rituals while finding the necessary, vital humor.”  Cohen added, “There's immense heart to this production” and he found, “Hynes direction is assured, filled with comedic grace and the brittle tension of daily grind.” 

David Barbour of Lighting & Sound America deemed “that Garry Hynes' production has an antic physicality that gives this Godot an artfully cartooned quality all its own.”  He asserted, “Indeed, in this Godot, the news is so awful that there's nothing left to do but laugh.”  Barbour complained, however, “The one weakness of this approach is that—during the first half, especially—the actors seem to leap from one comic conceit to another with such skill that some of the play's darker, deeper notes are obscured.”  But he backed off some, conceding that “in the later passages, a genuine and profound sense of loss emerges.”  The LSA reviewer’s final analysis was: “For all its comic invention, Hynes' approach may not be to all tastes . . . .  But if, like me, you recognize Beckett's essential place in the dramatic canon while quarreling—for reasons of temperament, philosophy, or religious belief—with his vision, this may be the Godot for you.”

Show-Score’s lowest-rated review, with a score of 70, was Darryl Reilly’s notice on TheaterScene.net, in which he explained, “Yoga tree poses, pratfalls, and rapid-fire verbal delivery reminiscent of Abbott and Costello routines are characteristic of how director Garry Hynes answers the question of what to do with Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, Waiting for Godot.”  Reilly reported, “Ms. Hynes has the cast at full speed emphasizing slapstick and employing stylized poses and gestures.  There’s exaggerated choreography-like movement such as extending legs and dipping down, grabbing at each other and jumping.”  He felt that this tactic was “accomplished if overdone” because the “plethora of gags and set up punchline recitation gets laughs at the expense of emotional resonance.”  The TS reviewer thought, however, “A few bits are quietly played due to the nature of those specific passages and are quite lovely,” but “[o]verall, there is a lack of visceral depth to this arguably superficial treatment.”  His final word was: “This Waiting for Godot is overall pleasing without making much of an impact.”

[I got to the theater for Godot at about 7:15 for the 7:30 curtain. (I had a problem on the subway.)  I arrived to be greeted by a longish line for security checks.  I encountered heavy security for To the End of the Land, the Israeli play I saw at the Lynch at last year’s Lincoln Center Festival (report posted 6 August 2017), but there’d been threats and protests for that.  I don’t know why there’d have to be such security measures for an Irish production of Waiting for Godot. ]