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This revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has a quirky, contemporary feel. Vladimir and Estragon still wear battered period hats (albeit trilbies rather than the traditional bowlers). But the “country road” setting becomes a long stretch of highway, with a double-yellow line running down the middle of the thrust stage. Lucky carries a Louis Vuitton suitcase and Vladimir’s grimy linen suit looks like an Armani or Kenzo cast-off. When he regrets not having jumped off the Eiffel Tower “a million years ago, in the Nineties”, we might just imagine him and Estragon on a boozy excursion to Paris during the 1998 World Cup.
The other main innovation of Arin Arbus’s staging lies in its inverted characterisation. We expect Estragon to be the more buffoonish and impulsive of the two tramps. Instead, Michael Shannon offers a controlled, pensive interpretation that is rich in hangdog melancholia. Vladimir, who typically has the portentous air of a would-be philosopher, here becomes a high-strung, irascible presence in Paul Sparks’s portrayal. Jeff Biehl’s Lucky similarly emerges as a more imposing figure than his master Pozzo, who seems unusually directionless and diffident in Ajay Naidu’s performance. And Toussaint Francois Battiste’s Boy comes across less as Godot’s angelic emissary than as a fellow lost and damaged soul.
The virtue of this approach to Godot is that Arbus and her cast unearth the latent flexibility of Beckett’s text, belying its reputation as a petrified monument of high Modernism that is zealously policed by the playwright’s estate. Shannon’s reinvention of Estragon as a doleful straight man is particularly revelatory, and Biehl invests Lucky’s nonsense monologue at the end of act one with surprising gravitas that brings out its biblical and Shakespearean echoes.
The overall effect is a little unbalanced, however, because the theme of role-reversal inherent in the play isn’t given enough space to develop. Sparks’s boisterous take on Vladimir would be more effective if it were allowed to build in intensity, logically peaking amid the disappointment of Godot’s failure to show up at the end of both acts. Instead, his agitation already reaches full throttle during the opening minutes, which feel rushed. Stripping Pozzo of his menacing authority in act one similarly undermines the dramatic power of his emotional collapse and loss of sight in act two.
© Hollis King
These weaknesses mean that Arbus’s staging struggles to come together for much of act one. The cast then strike up a more coherent rhythm after the interval, grounded in a lively, physical style of performance that makes nimble use of Riccardo Hernández’s capacious design. Despite an ever-present limp, Shannon now barnstorms around the theatre, creating a pleasing manifestation of the tramps’ circuitous arguments. And the four men’s existential exhaustion is neatly summed up when they all collapse in a heap in the middle of the road.
The all-American cast also add a vivid regional flavour to Beckett’s text, transporting the Irish playwright into the peripatetic land of John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy.
★★★☆☆
To December 3, tfana.org
2023-11-15 02:01:13
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