Royal
Lyceum Theatre
Five
stars
It looks
like a picture postcard reproduction of a still life at the start of Garry
Hynes’ production of Samuel Beckett’s existentialist vaudeville masterpiece for
Galway-based Druid Theatre. Aaron Monaghan’s Estragon is there, squatting like
a statue on a pebble-smooth rock that sits on yellow-scorched earth against a
battleship grey background. The rings on the barren tree beside him look like a
Van Gogh drained of life.
When
Marty Rea’s Vladimir enters, possibly the greatest comedy double act ever go into
their age-old daily routine as they hang around, filling in the void with
banter invested with the desperate comfort that familiarity brings with it. The
easiness is there, not just in the duo’s pet names of Gogo and Didi. It’s there
too in the way Monaghan and Rea move in unison, craning and stooping in synch, so
they resemble cartoons from a Victorian comic strip.
This
physical and visual dexterity brings Hynes’ production to life just as much as
Beckett’s words that feed it. Francis O’Connor’s painterly design and James F.
Ingalls’ biscuit-coloured lighting vividly frames Gogo and Didi’s antics. Monaghan
and Rea are by turns deadpan, hangdog and blessed with a terminal optimism, the
timing of their exchanges as deadly as in an old-school sit-com.
This
is Beckett revealed even more than he has been over the last few years as a
comedian extraordinaire. When Rory Nolan’s Pozzo comes on, lording it over
Garrett Lombard’s Lucky, the gulf between the haves and have-nots heightens the
gallows humour. And when Lucky lets rip with all his suppressed knowledge, he
free-forms like a beat poet unleashing the holiest of truths. These are mere
diversions, alas, that allow time to lurch forwards inbetween Gogo and Didi’s
endless longeurs. They relish these with a resignation one might mistake for hope.
The Herald, August 7th 2018
ends
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