National Post (National Edition)
Parting with tradition
Soulpepper’s new production of Waiting for Godot, directed by Daniel Brooks, has a curtain. It isn’t the grand old-fashioned kind that sweeps up and down; rather, it’s a modest little drape that moves bashfully from side to side. Still it’s a curtain, something rarely seen in theatres these days. Will these crazy experimentalist directors stop at nothing?
What the drawn curtain reveals is a stage that departs somewhat from the conventional look for Samuel Beckett’s open-road allegory of humanity and its discontents. Lorenzo Savoini’s set has a back wall, a pockmarked and decaying one, though it never quite suggests that we’re in a room. For one thing, it has the play’s statutory tree standing in front of it. There are a couple of pieces of debris for the tramps Vladimir and Estragon to rest their backsides on while they maintain their endless vigil but who, really, could begrudge them that? After all these years, they’ve earned it.
Whatever the peculiarities of its setting, Brooks’ production is his best in ages. The play in which, famously, “nothing happens — twice”, is kept alive by the dynamic tensions of its relationships; everywhere you look, there are lines of force between the characters. There is also an unusual spark to Oliver Dennis’ Estragon, the more sullen and morose of the two enforcedly patient vagrants. Most actors make him winsome and resigned, a lovable sad sack. Dennis makes him angry, right from his opening moments in which the pain of his sore feet registers more strongly, in both sight and sound, than it has in any of his predecessors. He’s furious at having to wait for Godot and at his companion’s inability to provide any convincing reason why they should. This is all very refreshing, though it does lead to an unfortunate cascade of shouting in the second act.
Diego Matamoros’ Vladimir is more conventional but carries that conventionality to invigorating extremes. If Vladimir is the intellectual of the pair Matamoros makes him positively professorial: an amateur philosopher with the airs of a professional (was he cruelly denied a teaching position?) ransacking the traces of his former learning in an increasingly desperate attempt to reassure both his friend and himself. For him, too, that desperation turns to rage when the Boy (Richie Lawrence, excellent) brings the news that Godot is, yet again, postponing. The conflicting forces within Vladimir show the actor at his incendiary best.
The play’s secondary couple, the slave-driving Pozzo and the driven slave Lucky, present a similar contrast of the expected and the surprising. I have never seen an actor fail as Lucky (to that extent he lives up to his name) and Alex McCooeye, preternaturally tall and pale and gaunt at the end of his rope, is a noble addition to the line. His outpouring of philosophical gibberish seems constantly on the verge of making sense, and certainly has its own emotional consistency. He could be Vladimir in a more advanced state of intellectual disarray. The break from tradition is Rick Roberts’ Pozzo, softer and smoother and silkier than the bully profundo to which we’re accustomed.
In the first act, where he’s on top of his world, this is both perplexing and disappointing; in the second, when he’s blind and helpless and desolate, it works much better, to the point of being a revelation. Who knew that Pozzo, with his sightless insights into the futility of life and time (“they give birth astride of a grave”) could be moving?
The production plays up the cruelty of the universe and that of the tramps themselves whose humane protests at the Pozzo-Lucky situation soon give way to the pleasures of kicking a man when he’s down. The bleakness is all encompassing, maybe excessively so. For the first time in my experience, this play about living with boredom has its own boring moments. But there aren’t many of them, and at the end, the curtain is decisively, ironically re-drawn to shield us from the worst of the Beckettian vision.
What it returns us to must be our own affair.
THE PLAY ... IS KEPT ALIVE BY THE DYNAMIC TENSIONS OF ITS RELATIONSHIPS.