Waiting for Godot a triumph
Other recent openings at Stratford offer two hits and one miss.
WAITING FOR GODOT
The festival’s latest production of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece features stellar performances from Stephen Ouimette and Tom Rooney as the play’s two immortal tramps condemned to day after day of eternal waiting for a Mr. Godot who will never come.
Ouimette’s Estragon — anxious, forgetful, reduced to a spasm of agony whenever Godot’s name is mentioned — reminds you of that last dying leaf clinging to a tree. Rooney, as the more articulate Vladimir, maintains his jaunty resilience, but it’s a battle to maintain hope in a hopeless tomorrow.
Jennifer Tarver’s admirable production sees them as sad clowns fading — the music has echoes of a mournful street band — and on a metaphysical level as the equivalent of a dying star.
Brian Dennehy’s work as the whip-cracking Pozzo provides the necessary disruptions in this atmosphere of nothingness, even though it smacks more of an overbearing star turn than an attempt to arise naturally from Beckett’s elusive text.
Randy Hughson’s performance as Pozzo’s catatonic slave is a miracle of body language and nuanced silence.
The production’s triumph is further strengthened by designer Teresa Przbylski whose bleak wintry use of the Tom Patterson stage sends an icicle through the soul. (To Sept. 20)
THE THRILL
The Thrill, Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s contribution to the euthanasia debate, seems more interested in issues than in believable drama.
It is salvaged to a degree by Lucy Peacock’s fierce and credible performance as Elora, a brilliant but severely disabled woman who in middle age continues to be a tart-tongued defender of the right of people such as herself to exist no matter how horrific their disabilities.
However, Robert Persichini fights a losing battle to bring credibility to the role of the honey-tongued pop philosopher who has earned her undying enmity for advocating compassionate euthanasia.
Matters become even less plausible when the two fall in love, and neither director Dean Gabourie nor his performers can avoid becoming mired in a trough of highfalutin’ soap opera. (To Sept. 22)
TAKING SHAKESPEARE
John Murrell’s play about the joy of learning is a small gem. It may remind some of Educating Rita, but Murrell puts his own stamp on it, and there’s terrific work from festival newcomer Luke Humphrey as the fumbling undergraduate who can’t understand Shakespeare and Martha Henry as the curmudgeonly academic who reluctantly takes him under her wing. (To Sept. 22)