Waiting for Godot is a church service for suicidal unbelievers. Those who attend the rite on a regular basis find themselves wondering how boring it will be this time. A bit boring, of course, but there are laughs to be had in James Macdonald’s production. The set resembles a Gazan bombsite with a tree-stump stranded in a pit of ashen rubble. Didi is played as a goofy English toff by Ben Whishaw who supplied the voice of Paddington in the movies. The bear is back.
Whishaw gives an engaging, high-energy performance, like a Blue Peter presenter with a theology degree
Whishaw gives an engaging, high-energy performance, like a Blue Peter presenter with a theology degree, leaping about the stage, staring up into the stars for inspiration or encouraging his pal with affectionate caresses and edible treats. Lucian Msamati’s Gogo is a little too plump for a vagabond who subsists on raw turnips and scavenged carrots. He finds plenty of rancour and petulance in the role but no traces of sweetness or pathos. And how did this man end up homeless? He wears an old boilersuit like a failed lumberjack but he uses the lofty diction of the expensively educated and he claims to have been a poet.
His backstory is hard to unscramble, whereas Whishaw represents a recognisable archetype: the dreamy public-school dropout who swaps affluence for the freedom of the road. Tom Edden’s rigid and unchanging Lucky enters with sucked-in cheeks and crazy eyes, like the ghost of Paganini, but he never alters or develops. He delivers the great speech as a slice of random windbaggery without any internal coherence. This leaves Didi and Gogo to harvest the laughs by reacting with anger and bafflement to his seemingly endless monologue. And yet Edden is a great physical comedian. Why can’t he profit from this opportunity?
The role of Pozzo is usually played as a sadistic milord, like Oswald Mosley roaming his estate looking for bumpkins to shout at, but Jonathan Slinger finds strange depths and touches of lyricism in the role. On stage, he seems to be improvising his lines as he works his way towards a heart-warming and vulnerable eccentricity. Not a nasty bounder but a broken prophet searching for his starting point and his destination. There’s more than a touch of Ralph Richardson about this mischievous, off-beat, teasing performance. How fitting that Pozzo should speak the play’s best-known lines about life’s futility: ‘They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’
The show belongs to Slinger and Whishaw. A lopsided result but that’s what happens when you field the wrong players in the wrong part of the pitch.
Another pair of poetic drifters appear in Two of Us, directed by Scot Williams, which dramatises the final meeting between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The setting is Lennon’s all-white New York apartment and the year is 1976. McCartney’s new album, Band on the Run, has just topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic but he still craves Lennon’s personal approval. The witty script by Mark Stanfield, Richard Short and Barry Sloane pays tribute to their punning badinage. ‘You’re asking me to bare my soles,’ says McCartney (Jay Johnson) when Lennon orders him to remove his shoes at the door of the apartment. Lennon calls his new home ‘Madhatter island’ and he rejects proposals to reform the Beatles, ‘by popular dementia’.
The production looks and feels fantastic and the impersonations are uncannily accurate. The chic apartment, designed by Amy Jane Cook, is slightly and deliberately misaligned with the seating area to make the audience feel like eavesdroppers snooping in on a private conversation. Lennon (Barry Sloane) struggles to admit that he enjoyed McCartney’s new music. ‘But you can do better,’ he adds cruelly. Later, he lashes out at McCartney by disavowing their friendship entirely. ‘We were never that close.’
This is a brave and deeply unpleasant portrait of a sad, self-pitying recluse who pads around his luxury penthouse in a white robe, like Jesus on sickness benefit. Lennon is lonely, unoccupied, bitter and fathomlessly angry. For light relief he throws open the windows and hurls abuse at passing police cars. Without his talent, that might have been the summit of his achievement: swearing at traffic. His new ambition is to raise his son, Sean, but the boy has been whisked off to California by Yoko ‘to buy a cow’. Even as a parent, Lennon is doomed to fail.
The show ends with the pair smoking dope on the roof and exchanging an improbable gay kiss. McCartney descends into oleaginous schmaltz. ‘I see a frightened man who doesn’t know how beautiful he is,’ he says. Instead of mocking this sugary drivel, Lennon accepts it as a profound truth. Well, he would. The show doesn’t shy away from the possibility that Lennon’s pose as a saintly hermit contained a large element of fraud.
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