A fitting 50th anniversary revival for Dunedin’s Globe.
Footsore: Harry Love as Gogo
Two men, more articulate than their dress or circumstances might indicate, pass the time of day on a deserted roadside expecting a third. Nothing much happens, a situation embroidered by the pair with neuroses, sore feet, feeble bladders and philosophical perambulations. They cannot or choose not to leave for fear of missing the rendezvous.
They are, of course, waiting for Godot, who in the event never turns up. One of the most significant English language plays of the 20th century or a finely filigreed existentialist joke? Regardless, as the Globe Theatre revival of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist “tragicomedy” amply illustrates, Waiting for Godot can be a hypnotic experience.
Originally performed in Paris in 1953, the play had its first London production in 1955 and arrived at the forerunner of the Globe a mere four years later. Fitting, then, that it should return for the Dunedin theatrical institution’s 50th anniversary season. Fitting as well that two of the city’s most tireless and talented theatre-makers should be integral to the production: director Richard Huber and set and lighting designer Marty Roberts.
The latter creates within the Globe’s constricted stage area an effortless sense of space. Planks of wood and soil or sawdust combine to form the streetscape out of which the solitary adorning tree grows. Then Roberts drenches or merely brushes it in light to describe the time of day or night, the mood or madcappery of the moment.
Here, as the play opens, we find the tramp Estragon – “Gogo” to his mate Vladimir (“Didi”) – wrestling with his too-small boots. And so begin the circumlocutions, the verbal jousting, the ruminations and repetitions on which the enterprise is built. Harry Love makes an excellent Gogo, vulnerable, footsore and hungry, while John Watson gives a finely judged performance as his foil, wrestling equally with a problematic prostate and the philosophical dimensions of their Groundhog Day-like predicament.
Their bickering is interrupted only by the arrival of Pozzo (Jimmy Currin) and his “slave”, Lucky (Jerome Cousins), not only in Act I, but again in Act II. Both acquit themselves creditably, as does Liam Johnston as Boy, but the play belongs to the two tramps.
Performed repeatedly and in many countries since its premiere, Godot has frequently been imbued with political or social nuance. Huber plays this production straight, allowing Beckett’s language to carry the play’s teasing, elusive freight, but also ensuring the enduring humanity of Gogo and Didi – who toy with parting, flirt with death and strive to find some small sliver of meaning in their existence – shines through their attenuated but mutually dependent lives.
WAITING FOR GODOT, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Richard Huber, Globe Theatre, Dunedin, August 18-28.