Review: A ‘Waiting for Godot’ as Comically Futile as a Looney Tune

Perhaps references to The Three Stooges would be relevant.

Title is The Beauty Queen of Leenane, not The Beauty of Leenane. (I saw the first Broadway production and was blown away.)

I attended Saturday's matinee and was totally taken with this production. Yes, there's quite a bit of physical play and quasi-slapstick, but the thing I really appreciated was the actor's ability to really make every line sing. It's unfortunate that Beckett has almost become shorthand for unrelenting bleakness. Yes, his work is bleak, but the wicked humor that courses thorough his work is an equally powerful force - the little light shining on a distant shore that keeps us going about our daily existence. For me they got that balance totally right. You can tell these gifted actors have thought deeply about these characters and have been inhabiting this world for a long long time as they production has been on tour. You also sense their deep love for Beckett.

The very prerequisite to appreciate and enjoy a live theater presentation is the ability to hear, understand and discern the lines of dialogue spoken by the actors. On that score Sunday's performance was a total failure for this spectator and his guest. A heavily Irish accented English, a lack of voice projection that did not reach the rear seats of the auditorium, inaudible exchanges every time a protagonist would turn his face away from the audience, etc ... all these contributed to a disappointing and frustrating evening and an early departure at intermission !

Saw Waiting for Godot at Hartford Stage Co when I was about 13. Couldnt decide whether I should laugh or cry, which was SB s plan from what I saw. Sounds like a retro interpretation that touches the first , ie laughing, a bit more than the latter. Seems a lot of reviewers are getting proverbial noses out of joint over a different twist than the more recent versions. Sounds interesting.

This review is demeaning and misleading. The audience at yesterday's matinee seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. The performers were fabulous, sometimes calling to mind Chaplin and Keaton, but Saturday morning cartoons? Not in the least. The Druid production presents a profound tragicomedy about two poor souls bound to each other in pain and in laughter, in hope and in hopelessness. I've seen many fine Beckett productions over the decades, and I thought this one was magnificent.

This production, which I saw yesterday afternoon, is brilliantly acted and directed. It is certainly a valid interpretation of the Beckett play. Perhaps, it has more comic touches and intermittently funnier moments than other productions I have seen in NYC and London, but these comic flourishes are certainly there in the text, and not just gratuitous attempts to get a strained laugh here and there. I can appreciate Mr. Brantley's remark that, by the end, one didn't feel the overtly touching, melancholy feeling of attachment between Didi and Gogo that, for example, the recent (superb) McKellen/ Stewart production had. Those two giants of the theatre were also much older (in their late 70's) ) than the two main actors in this production (who look in their early-/mid forties), so the final effect would naturally be different. However, Mr. Brantley's comparison of these actors' physical movements that reminded him at times of Saturday morning cartoon characters is simply preposterous.

I haven't yet seen this production, but the review highlights the essential aspect of all of Beckett's work - the bleak and the hilarious are often the same. What is always missing from Beckett is horror; horror wouldn't fit his sensibility at all because its depiction, its cold, its starkness, would violate the existential ambiguity of everything else in his work.

When I was a kid, I saw the 1956 production Waiting For Godot starring Bert Lahr, it was funny very funny. "Everyone" was talking about the play - "what does it mean?" "I don't it," etc. Walter Winchell was personally insulted by it. I loved the play and I loved Bert Lahr. A year later, I saw him and Angela Lansbury in a Feydeau, Hotel Paradiso. I thought it was just like Godot. The too stars were in a hotel room trying to have an extra-marital tryst, but all sorts of people including her husband kept arriving. Well, seemed to me to be the same story.

I saw this production yesterday and although there was much to admire about it, the "comedic" take often worked to obscure its more reflective elements. For example, Lucky's famed soliloquy was reduced to funny hyper-speech, which obscured some of the very interesting things that he was saying. I, for one, have no problem with seeing a play about hopelessness reflect the hopelessness. Shall we next have a slapstick version of "Long Days Journey Into Night," or perhaps "The Iceman Cometh?"