Review: Waiting for Godot

I wonder if, deep down, Ian McKellen feels short-changed by Patrick Stewart. These two Royal Shakespeare Company heavyweights go back a long way. Since they last appeared on stage together in 1977 their parallel careers have each delivered acclaimed performances across the classical canon, most recently a nude Lear (McKellen) and a bold Macbeth (Stewart). They were reunited in the X-Men movies as good and evil masterminds — the brooding scowliness of Stewart’s Professor Xavier opposite the scowly broodingness of McKellen’s Magneto.

In Sean Mathias’s over-elaborate production of Samuel Becktett’s bleak masterpiece, Stewart and McKellen’s tramps are like a couple of old-school music-hall performers with fading memories of better times and old routines.

It is an interpretation invited by Beckett’s text. When Estragon (McKellen) and Vladimir (Stewart) pass the time by trading insults, the abuse climaxes with Estragon denouncing Vladimir as a “Crritic”, spelt by Beckett with two r’s, inviting the superior diction of an actor who loves to roll them. And when the cruel Pozzo, played by Simon Callow like a ringmaster who has lost his ring, asks the tramps: “How did you find me? Good? Fair? Passable? Mediocre? Positively bad?” it comes as if from one stage-pro to another.

Still, Mathias over-eggs the music-hall pudding somewhat. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s design sets the action on steeply raked broken stage boards framed by a decaying proscenium arch and overlooked by scaffolding and torn scenery hanging precariously from the flies.

Callow turns sitting down into a running joke, straining every sinew as his apparently constipated posterior nears its target, which culminates in a comedy “boing” as he lands. Only Ronald Pickup’s gaunt Lucky, ironically, the only character commanded to perform, has no showbiz instinct about him.

And if there were any doubts about Vladimir and Estragon’s performing past, they are put paid to by the business with the hats, during which the duo try on their own bowlers and Lucky’s in a speeded-up routine like a game of find the lady, only with no lady.

The point is, Beckett needs no such emphasis. The author was very particular about stage direction. The hat routine for instance is meticulously described in his text. And there is no reason to think that when Beckett described his set as “A country road. A tree. Evening.” he was inviting any more interpretation than he was for the stage directions.

Still, over-interpretation is better than mis-interpretation. The play’s minimalism has in the past tempted some directors to add a political context, which only obscures Beckett’s central point about the condition of all humans — that we are all waiting for something, and for that something to save us, and in the saving, for our lives to have meaning.

It is a tragic condition superbly captured by McKellen’s Estragon and for the most part missed by Stewart’s Vladimir. McKellen delivers a heartbreaking portrait of a has-been who is bewildered by his own existence. The nose is bruised by alcohol and when he turns to direct his attention, the swivel of his head lacks full control, the gaze appears to start with the middle distance before being pulled into focus. Every time Vladimir reminds him what they are waiting for, Estragon lets out the most desolate cry.

Stewart’s twinkle-toed tramp however is much less interesting. This comes as a surprise, not least because, since his Star Trek days, Stewart has taken his stage career by the horns and turned in a string of terrific performances for the RSC. Here he is the controlled foil to McKellen’s disintegrating old soak. In the old days his Vladimir might have served as the straight man to Estragon’s star turn. Yet this Vladimir is too refined for the crude, extinct world of music hall that Mathias has gone to so much trouble to emphasise.

In the pauses — filled by the sinister rhythm of distant machinery — McKellen sinks into despair. Not so with Stewart. The objective is presumably to establish a contrast. But the result is that you care much more about the fate of one than the other. McKellen’s tramp, I wanted to hug. Stewart’s does not need saving. It left me wondering the extent to which these actors compete when they are on stage together. If such competition exists, McKellen must be delighted to be the outright winner, but frustrated that the impact of his Godot is much less than it could have been.

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