WAITING FOR GODOT
Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1
COME prepared to be seduced by this new production of Samuel Beckett's incessantly bleak homily to absence - Waiting for Godot.
X-Men sparring partners Ian McKellen (left) and Patrick Stewart (right) step into large theatrical boots to play Estragon and Vladimir, vagrants caught in a half century cycle of waiting for mysterious saviour Godot.
Famously, he never turns up.
Stewart's foot stomping, giddy Vladimir is ever the optimist and retains intellectual one-upmanship in the unfolding banter. But he is subservient to the moods of McKellen's brilliantly characterised Estragon, a pig-headed but ultimately vulnerable northern grumpy old git with a twinkle in his eye.
Rarely do your eyes willingly leave him as he hobbles and hops with vigour across the stage.
The Vaudevillian twangs of director Sean Mathias's staging and McKellen and Stewart's Laurel and Hardy pastiches will niggle some. But a homoerotic spark between their characters, particularly in the hair-stroking lullaby scene, generates real tenderness that adds to the confusion and menace of all that waiting.
There is one tacitly welcomed diversion with the arrival of Pozzo, a bumbling fat-cat with the charisma of a circus ringmaster in the hands of Simon Callow, and his silently downtrodden servant Lucky played by Ronald Pickup. Could Godot in all his glory have arrived after all?
Electrifyingly good acting underpins this production's new take on Beckett's stubborn old men tormented by the terrors of infinitely spiralling time. - EMMA YOULE
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