REVIEW
Waiting for Godot
Where: Roxy Theatre
When: To March 15
Rating: 4 1/2 (out of five)
The essential look of Waiting for Godot is an iconic image of 20th- century theatre: two bowler-hatted tramps loitering under a leafless tree.
It’s so familiar, as is the play’s unrelenting strangeness, that it’s difficult for the modern theatre-goer to comprehend how revolutionary Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play was when it premièred. Many critics and audiences railed, no doubt believing a smirking intellectual had pulled a fast one at their expense.
The absurdism and existential struggles presented are still profoundly striking and discomfiting, as evidenced by Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre’s excellent revival of Waiting for Godot. Yet it’s safe to say today’s audience, honed by television and the Internet, will find this peculiar world less alien. Schooled by Monty Python, Andy Kaufman and decades of unrelenting irony, we’re more at home (or at least, familiar) with Beckett’s brand of bleak nihilism and black humour.
This fine production is directed by Jacob Richmond, known for such bizarro-world comedies as Ride the Cyclone and Legoland. With Waiting for Godot, one could argue Richmond’s fondness for weirdo theatricality surfaces in the role of Lucky (Trevor Hinton). A stuttering, profoundly damaged husk who gibbers nonsensically and dances spasmodically, Lucky is here even more of a freak-show mutant: cavorting in charred long underwear, swinging a grotesque, thigh-length mop of grey hair.
Overall, Richmond has approached Waiting for Godot entirely on its own terms, aiming to bring out all nuances and subtleties. This works well. On Thursday night, Peter Anderson (Vladimir, a.k.a. Didi) and Brian Linds (Estragon, a.k.a. Gogo) found the noir-clown humour in their relationship, sometimes coming off like a quirky version of Laurel and Hardy. Yet the pair — navigating the stage with delicacy and grace — never let comedy blunt the pathos and poetry of their characters.
Anderson, schooled in commedia dell’arte, has a winning physical dexterity — there are several sequences in which his dances, long arms fluttering, are a pure delight. Linds finds exactly the right balance for Estragon, who whines and clings to Vladimir, but is just as likely to yell and rebel. There’s a touching asymmetry to the two; Anderson is long and lanky, Hinds chubby and boy-like. At the end, as the light dims, the pair stand facing the audience holding hands, a poignant gesture that’s both brave and touching.
No one performed better than veteran actor Scott Hylands. His Pozzo wears a white bowler, matching tails and riding boots. The character is a fat cat on the lam; he calls for his expensive watch and pipe, keeping luggage-lugging Lucky — tethered by a rope — in line with a whip.
Hylands rip-roared into the role, his Pozzo declaiming like a derailed Shakespearean actor battered by some barely survived catastrophe. It was Hylands who provided Waiting for Godot with a glittering, hallucinatory energy. Through this Pozzo — a Lear-like shell of a man — we understand the absurdity of social status and material gain in the presence of the mortality that faces everyone, no matter what their station in life.
The set, by Andy Graffiti, is the traditional bare-bones version. Once again, the denuded tree miraculously sprouts half a dozen leaves in Act 2. It’s a rare sign of hope in a bleak universe. And believe me, it’s bleak: Beckett presents a God-less world where religion has become an empty ritual, where the very act of living has devolved into dull repetition and meaninglessness.
This is wonderfully bracing theatre: powerful, elemental, striking to the very heart of the human condition. If there was ever a justification for the existence of Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre, which of late has struggled to find a financial footing, this revival of Waiting for Godot is it.