Waiting for Godot
Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
The Caretaker
Trafalgar Studios, London
Theatre modernism used to be the shock of the new. Nowadays, what’s disturbing is the sheer popularity of plays which in the past exemplified the difficulty of contemporary theatre. But this popularity sometimes feels as if it has been bought at a cost: aren’t serious plays diminished if they are played just for laughs?
At the moment, Londoners have a good chance to ponder this question because two modernist post-war classics are currently enjoying solid revivals. They are Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, first staged in this country in 1955 after its Paris premiere two years previously, and Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, first performed in 1960. How
do they stand up to the pressures of our
laugh-a-minute culture?
Well, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – which was first revived by director Sean Mathias last year – is one of those symbolic chameleon plays that changes its meaning to suit every political and social context. Oddly enough, Mathias and his designer, Stephen Brimson Lewis, have chosen to set the play in a ghostly ruined theatre, with the script’s solitary tree sprouting out of the rubble.
While this gives the play a suitably apocalyptic atmosphere, it’s hard to take seriously as a comment on theatre, given the fact that the West End has proved remarkably resilient during the credit crunch. Nor does the ruin of the set evoke either the collapse of the world’s banking system, nor the foreign adventures of the West in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much for relevance.
This starry production – with Ian McKellen, Roger Rees, Matthew Kelly and Ronald Pickup – soon settles into an evening of light entertainment. McKellen’s Estragon is a depressed northerner whose trademark lament of being tired blends nicely with a suggestion that his befuddled mind is due to early onset Alzheimer’s rather than being trapped in an absurd world. By contrast, Rees’ Vladimir comes across as a Shakespearean Londoner, energetic and desperately holding things together.
Although Godot never arrives, two visits from Pozzo and his slave introduce Kelly as the brash master, loud, big and bold, while Pickup’s Lucky is a dessicated and exhausted character whose gibbering act one monologue earns deserved applause.
This is a very atmospheric production, with strange changes of light from rosy sunsets to moonlit spots, as well as eerie music. Both McKellen and Rees excel in the slapstick and vaudeville routines, and both strongly convey the heroic struggles of old age against the fading of the light. What’s missing is a sense of high seriousness, and poetry: this is for those who like their Beckett lite.
By contrast, Christopher Morahan’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, first seen in Liverpool last year, does evoke the modernistic blend of literary seriousness and popular clowning. As the smelly tramp Davies, Jonathan Pryce delivers a convincing performance of genius, with constant fidgets and darting eyes, wary, feral and clearly troubled by the ravages of life.
It’s a remarkably strong, if unsympathetic reading of the character, and one’s sympathies tend to move to and from him, and the brothers that have given him shelter. Like Godot, this play seems to be about the outsider on the one hand, and the old man on the other. Age – and its mental suffering – give renewed resonance to both these masterpieces of modern theatre. Despite their jocularity, their politics are now all about our ever-ageing population.
Aleks Sierz
