Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking play is back again, this time starring Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati. Its tragicomic take on existence may match our cultural moment
Godot keeps on coming. A play that on its London debut in 1955 was greeted with bafflement and derision (“another of those plays that tries to lift superficiality to significance through obscurity,” wrote Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard) is now big box office. The latest iteration of Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaker comes in September when Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw appear in James Macdonald’s production at that temple of luxurious elegance, the Theatre Royal Haymarket. So what has changed in close on 70 years to make Beckett’s play popular?
The short answer would be that both the theatre and the culture at large are very different now from what they were in 1955. One thing Beckett taught us was that plays need neither spacious plots, sumptuous sets nor multiple characters to hold our attention: as Stoppard once wrote, “Beckett redefined the minima of theatrical validity” and Sir Tom, along with Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill and countless others, have been beneficiaries of Beckett’s pathfinding. We are also no longer taken aback by the idea that plays, like life itself, are inexplicable and incapable of resolution: if anything, we have grown wary of artists, politicians and philosophers who assume they have readymade answers to the conundrum of existence.
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