Waiting for the End of Godot

At the moment, I am looking at the snow, rapidly falling like fat wet pigeon feathers past my tenth floor window, and I am feeling incredibly fortunate that I got to the matinee performance of "Waiting for Godot" yesterday instead of today, because yesterday nothing was falling out of the sky.

Now, as far as whether I was lucky to see this play, with the megawattage of Ian McKellan as Estragon and Patrick Stewart as Vladimir drawing them into the theater in droves (Billy Crudup is in it, too, playing Lucky, and then there's the actor I can't help thinking of as That Other Guy in the role of Pozzo) - I can't quite decide.  Certainly Mssrs. Stewart and McKellan were good, but then, with names like that, you'd expect them to be good.  Were they inspired?  Did I walk out of the theater saying to myself, "Now I have seen this difficult and - let's be truthful, now! - often tedious play performed so brilliantly that I spent every moment riveted and fully engaged.  Now I can see what all the fuss is about, and why this work endures and has universal application, even though it doesn't always come across on the page when they're making you read it in high school"?

The answer, sadly, is, "No.  No, not really."

And that answer might have been different, had I not had the 2009 Broadway revival of the play in mind as my standard of Beckett excellence, in which we had Bill Irwin as Vladimir, Nathan Lane as Estragon, John Goodman as a magnificently bombastic Pozzo, and John Glover as the luckless Lucky.

Don't get me wrong.  There were inspired moments in the Stewart/McKellan version.  Ian McKellan leaning against a doorjamb in the classic Irma La Douce come-hither pose of a Parisian demimondaine wrung a guffaw out of me.  The switching-of-the-hats-like-a-three-card-monte-game routine was fun - we'd seen it done before, of course, but they did it well, and we were pleased and admiring.  The decision to present Pozzo, slavemaster and tormentor of the hapless Lucky, with a comic Southern accent guaranteed to infuriate all of your friends who hail from south of the Mason-Dixon line into shrieks of, "We don't talk like that!"?  Questionable.

The crux of the problem with the current production, I think, is that not one of the actors in the cast is known for his prowess as a Great Comic Actor.  See the cast list for 2009, above.  Bill Irwin - "American actor and clown noted for his contribution to the renaissance of American circus during the 1970s. He is known for his vaudeville-style stage performances." John Glover is most widely known for his role as Lionel Luthor on Smallville, but don't just take my word for it - the fact that he copped a Tony nomination for playing Lucky. tells you he was good.  Nathan Lane?  John Goodman?  I assume I don't have to explain to you why these guys are funny.

Waiting for Godot is one of the great and definitive Theater of the Absurd masterpieces.  It is a comic presentation of the existential nightmare that faces everyone who has every wondered, "What on earth is the point?  Why are we even on this planet?  Should we all just off ourselves?  Because it seems we're just idling away our time, waiting for the end.  And after that, maybe there's God...or something...or maybe there's not.  Maybe we're just kidding ourselves,  filling up our days with pointless activity that, in the end, means absolutely nothing."

And this line of thinking will eventually get you so paralyzed with horror - the kind of horror that James Joyce, that other Irishman who faced down the terrors and tiny tragedies that make up our quotidian existence with the only weapons at his disposal - i.e.,  a ferocious intellect, an overpowering appetite for Life in all its ugly, smelly, filthy, ludicrous glory, and that depraved Irish wit that makes an evening spent at an Irish pub the equivalent of a semester at Harvard, only you have a lot more fun - termed G.P.I., or General Paralysis of the Insane - that your only remaining choices are to either hang yourself from that dead tree taking up most of stage left, or accept the fact that it's all a great big cosmic joke, the joke is on you, and you may as well join in and laugh your ass off.

And that's why you need a clown - a broken-hearted clown - a clown who is laughing at himself and everyone else, laughing at the undeniable and heartbreaking knowledge that, despite the fact that "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" neither he, nor you, nor I - in short, that none of us - has got the sense it takes to lie down and die.