Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Five stars
The stage curtain creaks as it rises with painstaking slowness on the barren twilight zone occupied by Samuel Beckett’s most forlorn of duos in Dominic Hill’s moving new production for the Citz. Here, George Costigan and Matthew Kelly embody Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s mould breaking piece of mid twentieth century existential vaudeville with a tragicomic rapport that comes through a lifetime of shared experience.
All dressed down and wildly bearded, the pair look more like redneck hobos living in the woods than the silent movie double act they are often presented as. Only through the terminal sense of tragicomic pathos that they hold on to throughout all the brilliant bickering Beckett has concocted for them do they find some kind of accidental salvation.
Jean Chan’s set looks like some battle scarred lower depths, with Costigan and Kelly guarding it through the night like long lost casualties of a war nobody bothered to tell them was over. As they wait for the mysterious and unreliable Godot, a life of unspoken moments spills over into a need for meaning beyond the everyday torpor they are stuck with.
Costigan and Kelly deliver this with understated but still heartbreaking hangdog warmth as they go round in ever decreasing circles getting nowhere fast. Only when the rush of something new arrives does something provide an all too fleeting relief from the sleepless norm to liven up their days. This comes here in the form of Gbolahan Obisesan’s slave driver Pozzo and his captive Lucky, played by Michael Hodgson, whose bottled up knowledge in his famous monologue’s torrent of words is a release from his own suppression. By the second act, with Obisesan’s flamboyantly needy Pozzo now blind, Lucky carries on regardless, unaware of the power he could wield.
In the hands of Hill’s onstage quartet in this co-production with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Bolton Octagon, Beckett’s masterpiece becomes the darkest of sitcoms. The nods to the audience and routines with the shoes and the hats may be pure music hall, but they also suggest Vladimir and Estragon’s lives are so entwined as to make them indistinguishable. In the end, the motions they go through are just one more way of getting by in a bombed out world where all they can do is cling together for comfort in a still powerful evocation of humanity’s ability to survive in the face of all the life denied them.
The Herald, February 27th 2026
ends
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