Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre Club is a play to send the rationalist out of his mind and induce tooth-gnashing among people who would take Lewis Carroll╒s Red Queen and Lear╒s nonsense exchanges with the fool as the easiest stuff in the world. The play, if about anything, is ostensibly about two tramps who spend the two acts, two evenings long, under a tree on a bit of waste ground ╤ ╥waiting for Godot.╙
Godot, it would seem, is quite possibly God, just as Charlot is Charles. Both tramps are dressed like the Chaplinesque zanies of the circus and much of their futile cross-talk seems to bear some sort of resemblance to those music-hall exchanges we know so well: ╥You know my sister?╙ ╥Your sister? ╥Yes, my sister,╙ and so on, ad lib. One of the tramps is called Estragon, which is the French for tarragon herb: the other is called Vladimir. On the first evening their vigil is broken by the arrival of a choleric employer called Pozzo (Italian for a well) and a downtrodden servant Lucky, who looks like the Mad Hatter╒s uncle.
On the second evening this pair reappears, the former now blind and led by the latter, now a deaf mute. As night falls on both sessions a boy arrives to announce that Godot cannot keep the interview for which the tramps so longingly wait. And at the end of it, for all its inexplicit and deliberately fatuous flatness, a curious sense of the passage of time and the wretchedness of man╒s uncertainty about his destiny has been communicated out of the very unpromising material.
The allegorist is Sam Beckett, who was once James Joyce╒s secretary and who writes in French for preference. His English version bears traces of that language still. The language, however is flat and feeble in the extreme in any case. Fine words might supply the missing wings, but at least we are spared a Claudelian rhetoric to coat the metaphysical moonshine.
The play bored some people acutely. Others found it a witty and poetic conundrum. There was general agreement that Peter Hall╒s production did fairly by a work which has won much applause in many parts of the world already and that Paul Daneman in particular, as the more thoughtful of the two tramps gave a fine and rather touching performance. Peter Woodthorpe, Timothy Bateson, Peter Bull, and a boy, Michael Walker, the mysterious Godot╒s messenger, all played up loyally. There was only one audible retirement from the audience, though the ranks had thinned after the interval. It is good to find that plays at once dubbed ╥incomprehensible and pretentious╙ can still get a staging. Where better than the Arts Theatre?
