Mr. Lane is a classic Broadway baby, a master of the one-liner with topspin. As Estragon, he’s in a subdued mode, which gives an extra piquancy to his trademark wryness. But his clarion voice and ringing delivery are that of a comic in command. This is a bit confusing, since Vladimir, in the reading of “Godot,” is more the take-charge guy.
But more pertinently, this Estragon and Vladimir don’t feel like a real couple except in their moments of synchronized vaudeville. I was glad to have contrasting actors up there. (Two of either would have been too much.) But I only rarely felt the poignancy of these longtime fellow travelers’ interdependence.
I should note that Mr. Lane and Mr. Irwin are never more convincingly allied, like people bonding in an earthquake, than when Mr. Goodman is onstage. As well they should be. Mr. Goodman’s blusteringly genteel Pozzo explodes with the nonsensical tyranny of the autocrats in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books. In his relationship with Mr. Glover’s superb Lucky, who suggests a broken-down horse trying to avoid the glue factory, his Pozzo embodies centuries of aristocratic entitlement and subjugation. (This is a performance that any student of class systems needs to see.) But Mr. Goodman lets us glimpse the tickling uncertainty within the stolidness. He is human, after all, which means his very foundation is doubt.
“I’ve been better entertained,” says Vladimir dismissively, when asked his opinion of one of Pozzo’s perorations. But if, as this play contends, all life is nothing but passing time that would have passed anyway, I can think of few more invigorating ways of both doing and acknowledging exactly that.
WAITING FOR GODOT
By Samuel Beckett; directed by Anthony Page; sets by Santo Loquasto; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; hair and wig design by Tom Watson; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Peter Hanson; technical supervisor, Steve Beers; general manager, Sydney Beers; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Harold Wolpert, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director, in association with Elizabeth McCann. At Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, Manhattan, (212) 719-1300. Through July 5. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
WITH: Nathan Lane (Estragon), Bill Irwin (Vladimir), John Goodman (Pozzo), John Glover (Lucky) and Cameron Clifford and Matthew Schechter (a Boy).
Ms. Boyle’s closely watched performance in a British talent contest may capture show-biz fantasies of the ordinary transfigured. Vladimir’s clumsy musical stylings follow how ordinary life really plays out. His making it through his song, step by faltering step, is like anybody making it through a single day. And the next day, and the next day, and all the next days to come. If he isn’t some sort of hero, then none of us are.
That’s entertainment? A grotty, half-senescent guy wrestling a song to a draw? When “Waiting for Godot” first arrived in New York 53 years ago, critics and theatergoers were divided on that question. (It ran for 59 performances, with a revival the following year that lasted less than a week.)
But in 2009, Anthony Page’s smart, engaging production for the Roundabout Theater Company makes it clear that this greatest of 20th-century plays is also entertainment of a high order. It seems fitting that “Godot” — which also stars Nathan Lane, John Glover and John Goodman — returns to Broadway in an interpretation that emphasizes the irresistible rhythms achieved by Beckett’s radical literary surgery, that of cutting basic theatrical diversions off at the knees.
Listen, for example, to Estragon (Mr. Lane), Vladimir’s vagabond companion of many decades, starting to tell a joke about an Englishman in a brothel and then forgetting all about after it the first line.
Or the lordly, arrogant Pozzo (Mr. Goodman, in a bravura Broadway debut), his booming authority fading as he finishes a lush pastoral description and says: “I weakened a little toward the end. Did you notice?” Or the cadaverous Lucky (Mr. Glover), Pozzo’s ill-used slave, trying to dance on collapsing legs.
At first glance, Vladimir and Estragon (or Didi and Gogo), side by side, resemble Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, slumming it in Irving Berlin’s larky hobo duet, “A Couple of Swells.” Look closer, though: these tramps’ faces are encrusted with what look like syphilitic chancres and fresh cuts, as well as stage dirt.
All the classic music-hall routines have been crippled and in the process acquire their own compelling grace and energy. “Waiting for Godot” may well be the ultimate statement in world drama on existential futility in the wake of the atom bomb and all that. But it’s also a brilliant piece of craftsmanship, which exactly matches its form to its content, while holding a mirror to its audience.
As Kenneth Tynan wrote of Beckett’s tramps after the infamous London premiere of “Godot” in 1955: “Were we not in the theater, we should, like them, be clowning and quarreling, aimlessly bickering and aimlessly making up — all, as one of them says, ‘to give the impression that we exist.’ ”
The high-concept reframing of this play over the years, the versions that have set it in assorted slums and postnuclear wastelands, have overdressed a work that needs no accessories. Mr. Page is a strong, naturalistic director who works from within the text rather than layering over it. (His previous Broadway productions include the excellent revivals of “A Doll’s House” in 1997 and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 2005.)
His approach to “Godot” (here pronounced GOD-oh) is respectful without being reverent, and it scales up the stark minimalism indicated by Beckett’s script into the sort of good-looking production that most Broadway theatergoers (and particularly Roundabout subscribers) seem to demand without sacrificing the play’s complex simplicity.
So rather than the usual basic mound of dirt and lone tree, we have a complete rocky landscape (designed by Santo Loquasto and exquisitely lighted by Peter Kaczorowski) and, in Mr. Lane (king of the Broadway musicals) and Mr. Goodman (who starred in the long-running sitcom “Roseanne”) two performers with marquee appeal who are not generally associated with classical drama. (Such casting has famous precedents: the comedian Bert Lahr played Estragon in the 1956 version, and Robin Williams and Steve Martin starred in the much debated 1988 Lincoln Center production, in which Mr. Irwin appeared as Lucky.)
As it turns out, these actors serve the purposes of Beckett’s bleak comedy admirably (and in Mr. Goodman’s case, spectacularly). I can’t recall another “Godot” that passed so quickly or that felt so assured in its comic timing. Such confidence doesn’t come easy in depicting a world in which, as Vladimir says anxiously, “time has stopped.”
The play’s narrative is defined, as its title promises, by the intransitive act of waiting for someone who is unlikely ever to show up. (Cameron Clifford and Matthew Schechter alternate in the role of the child who announces Godot’s nonarrival.) Yet Mr. Page and his cast generate brisk comic liveliness throughout the show with tasty variety of style and pacing enforced by the paradoxical grace of fine actors artfully being inept.
As a profound comedy, this “Godot” is deeply satisfying. As an emotionally moving work, it is less so, except when Mr. Goodman and Mr. Glover are onstage. That’s because while Mr. Irwin and Mr. Lane have each mapped credible paths to their roles, mostly the paths are parallel and rarely intersect.
