Review: Waiting for Godot by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs

     

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.

 

That was Winston Churchill in an October, 1939 radiocast discussing the newly announced pact between Germany and Russia, but his cryptic formulation could be applied as well to Samuel Beckett's 1948-1949 En attendant Godot, written in French and produced in Paris in 1953. Beckett's English-language translation of his own work was staged in London in 1955. The first U.S. staging that same year in Miami totally baffled vacationers; in 1956 it was recast and opened in New York with E.G. Marshall as Vladimir ("Didi") and Bert Lahr as Estragon ("Gogo"). What wouldn't I have given to see that staging -- though a recording is available all over the internet (click HERE). And, to my surprise, New York theatre critic Brooks Atkinson used the tagline cited above in his review of April 20, 1956. (I didn't know that when I started writing this, I swear!).

 

A 1998-1999 survey by the British Royal National Theatre identified Waiting for Godot as "the most significant English-language play of the 20th century."

 

Okay, that's enough Wiki. IYKYK, and the rest of you should. 

 

 

Waiting for Godot is indeed an enigma, with its circular dialogue between two very old friends suspended in nowhere, waiting for someone important who never shows. It's a crystal ball, a look into a hallucinatory present, where Vladimir and Estragon pass the time as best they can with dialogue, empty word games, assorted memories, speculations, half-informed stories about religion, and the endless, eternal, long-lasting, maddening wait for something (anything) of significance to happen. And what does appear? Pozzo, a carelessly jolly, cruel ringmaster leading on a rope a heavily laden and slobbering Lucky, slave to his caprice. In the first act they traverse; in the second they return, Pozzo blinded and confused, Lucky still abject.

 

Want interpretations? Check the Wikipedia article or go for a spin in the critical literature.

 

More of interest in the current moment is that Austin's Hyde Park theatre has hosted two different productions of Beckett's maddening masterpiece in the past six weeks. That fact speaks to the appalling, confusing time in which we live. I regret that I missed the first one, a one-weekend performance staged by the "Beards of Instagram." The second, directed by Hyde Park Theatre colleague Mark Pickell and featuring HPT stalwarts Ken Webster as Vladimir and Robert Pierson as Estragon, may have been a scrambling effort to make up for the financial disasters of COVID, diminished audiences, and the City of Austn's wrongheaded redirection of arts grants. An additional irony is that the three-night opening weekend was postponed, presumably because COVID somehow crept into the cast.

 

 

You could play Waiting for Godot with elements of carnival or farce; that was Veronica Prior's approach for the late, lamented Sam Bass Theatre in Round Rock in 2010 with the (sincerely) late, lamented Frank Benge as Vladimir and the (sincerely) late, lamented Craig Kanne as Estragon.

 

Pickell, Webster, and Pierson abstain from comedy.

 

Pickell stages the piece on a bare semi-thrust page with footlights, suggesting both a spiritual eternity and the artificiality of stage presentation. The audience files in and finds its seats to music emitted at stage center, apparently by a portable LP player the stage manager removes before lights go down. When they come up, it's on a stark picture suggesting the sort of barren landscape you see in Salvador Dali's 1931 surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory (the one with the melting watches).

 

Webster is somber and absorbed, picking away at the puzzles of this existence/existenial dilemma, trying fruitlessly to endow the situation and his relationships with meaning. He's aware of absurdities and picks at them like picking at scabs. Pierson's a simpler soul, apt to give up, nap, or protest. Their dialogue circles, peters out, Webster seeks ways to revive it. We eventually learn that they met picking grapes in France; one of them fell into the Rhone and was extracted dripping wet (dead? alive? are they in purgatory? We don't know, and that's only one of endless possibilities).

 

Since (quoting Peter Brook here:) in a theatre space anything can happen and something must happen, a strange two-person expedition appears: Titos Menchaca as the portly, assertive Pozzo and Matt Hislope as Lucky, his wordless slave. Pozzo lingers for genteel conversation, demonstrating an icily indifferent cruelty to the leashed Lucky. Hislope, formerly of Austin's scarily avant-garde Rubber Repertory, drools disgustingly, glowers, obeys and yields, and at Pozzos's command delivers an electrifying, kinetic nonsensical oration. Words richochet, Hislope jabs the air with an erratic side kick, all hope of logic is blown away. When this duo returns in act two, Pozzo will be blind. Lucky will still be enslaved and will reach out with helping hand to provide his master with the whip with which to command him.

 

In the director's note pubished in the program, Pickell recalls encountering this play in university and finding it incomprehensible. I brought my own daughter to witness the HPT interpretation, and she confided afterwards that she'd had the same reaction. What is this confusing, inconclusive mess trying to convey? Now, in her late 30's she finds that the riddles and enigmas and the narrowing horizons make more sense. I, much older than that, begin to appreciate the precious value of even the bleakest prospects as well as the vitality and eternity of the written word. Dour Samuel Beckett is no longer with us, but his visions of an apocalypse that fails to occur have deeply imprinted European and American consciousness. Pickell, Webster and company provide a welcome tonic to all the stage saccharine swirling through the holidays.

 

Be sorry that you missed it. Hyde Park Theatre proves once again that it's not obligatory for drama to entertain or distract. It's vital, sufficient and salutory for theatre art to look straight into the abyss.

 

 

 

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Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
Hyde Park Theatre

December 5 - 22, 2024

Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.

Added 8 p.m. performances Wednesday, December 8 and Sunday, December 22

Hyde Park Theatre, 43rd St at Guadalupe, Austin

Nine performances only. Get your tickets now.

Tickets available at hydeparktheatre.org