Druid Theatre Company
May 23–June 3, 2018, Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Reviewed by Max Maller
Step right up, folks. See no-show Godot and the two forgetful farts. Get a load of Mr. Moneybags with his valet on a big leash. Liked it the first time? Stick around for the second act and catch the entire blooming, buzzing, epistemological potato sack race to oblivion once more from the top, only slower this time, with feeling, but not in the toes. I forgot the kid! There’s a kid in it. Isn’t he cute? But he won’t remember being there and neither will anybody, if he was even there to begin with. And so too will our cinders get flushed headfirst down the proverbial Abbey Theater jakes during a matinee showing of At the Hawk’s Well, as described in section six. Nihilism! Modernism! L’chaim! ǫᴜᴀǫᴜᴀǫᴜᴀ. Excuse me. Rinse and repeat.
Debility is the topic, virtuosity the condition. If you have the misfortune to be a character on the Beckett stage, as the gouty, landed behemoth Pozzo groans at one point, your “memory is defective”; there are no exceptions to this. Estragon has to be reminded seven times over why he can’t leave the place he’s in (County Nowhere, Ireland, or perhaps France) and who it is he’s waiting for (“‘We’re waiting for Godot.’ ‘Ah!’ [Pause. Despairing.]”). And yet, it occurred to me again midway through Lucky’s aria at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre—where Druid Theatre’s triumphal rendition has travelled from Galway for a limited engagement—that there can be few plays in literature that put harsher demands on an actor’s working memory than do Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape, each one chock-full with amnesiacs. The words themselves are short and common ones, by and large, as in the French version—pace Testew & Cunard and the “Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy”—but they can feel so elliptical that it’s no wonder rehearsals for the most recent Broadway Godot are said to have routinely skipped entire pages of lines without anyone noticing. The stock retort is that in a play full of dead air and fossilized dry dung in a suspicious hue of metaphysical amber, it doesn’t necessarily even matter what sort of order things are said in. Is it rather a play for an ensemble of droolers from the vegetable aisle to murmur and splutter us with at random? I wouldn’t say no, but let Beckett’s fondness for athletic former vaudevillians be always remembered—decrepitude as act, as vector. It’s the Belaquac effect, as in Beckett’s favorite moment from the Commedia: a vagrant under a rock, meeting Virgil and Dante with their heads full of steam on the way up Mount Purgatory, says, “You may be obligated, first, to sit down.”
I can’t go on. I’ll go on. You’re only playing dead. Amber, when rubbed, becomes electric.
Marty Rea’s Vladimir is a head and a half taller than Aaron Monaghan as Estragon. This serves to play up the duo in what I would call their Abbot-and-Costello aspect. It also reinforces Rea, with his Satanic whiskers, as at times the Quixote to Monaghan’s Sancho Panza, which feels deliberate (and begs a dissertation). They look too young to have been friends for fifty years, but, as I have said, dry decrepitude is not the focus here. (Emotionally, as Estragon points out in what may not be so harmless of a joke, Vladimir is stunted at eleven.) Nor is an aggressive poignancy or chumminess the focus, thank God. The production’s brilliant pace from beginning to end emerges instead from the brittle ground of a bond between two “irreducible singlenesses,”[1] which is constantly complained of as a kind of death, but which undoubtedly is the only thing keeping you alive. Tennis is the ruling analogy for conversation in all of Beckett’s works, and Rea as server knows how to lob the ball over the net to Monaghan in a doomed way for the play’s innumerable and miraculously timed false starts, or with a light flick of the wrist for its sparkling rallies. Monaghan, a famous actor in Ireland, seems born for this role. If his Estragon is often the one hurt when he, Monaghan, rears up at Vladimir, or tries to kick Lucky, or scorns Pozzo, it’s because the real derision was aimed not at the person opposite but at the fog enclosing himself, his never being fully awake or asleep, an occlusive boredom. He is the intelligence of his soil, as though wafted up from the dry, caked sod of the environment—a set designed to perfection by Francis O’Connor. The tree, the boulder, the grey sky, the balloon of a moon: all is as stipulated. Circumscribing the stage, however, O’Connor has incorporated a glowing light box, revealing the lineaments of a zone beyond change and duration, except for the sudden appearance of some leaves on that iconic, mysterious tree between the acts.
Rory Nolan is a bravura Pozzo, merely a pith helmet shy of settler-colonial in his tyrannical peevishness over Lucky. He doesn’t bark orders so much as wince them. He enters the play on a plane of sham largesse that dumps him over the cusp into blindness and horror by the end. Lucky is played by Garrett Lombard, who got a tremendous round of applause for his colossal gnostic monologue even despite rattling it off quicker than an auctioneer.
Bodies and voices are the theater. Tuned to the right pitch they can do anything, even if that anything is nothing. This intensely energetic reading from Druid of a show so often accused of being essentially Ambien in play form doesn’t so much inject life into lifeless matter as reawaken eight thousand latent local vitalities. Every beat is fluent; every repetition marks time with the cumulative charge of a sameness in difference that makes the whole thing tick. Its very Irishness is a joy. And if the bulk of the lines are played, and possibly even written, predominately for yuks verging on the hollow kind (Beckett distinguished three kinds of laughter, with a palm for the “mirthless…the laugh laughing at the laugh…the risus purus”), that doesn’t entail that other levels of response to what is accomplished here in director Garry Hynes’s multivalent staging with such steady mastery will be lost on all attendees. Hynes, who won a Tony Award for directing The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1998, knows how to space her people so that gestures project across an area in the middle of the stage where no one is standing. In an introduction to the play that is printed with the program, the novelist Colm Tóibín compares the layout to a “film set when the camera has not yet arrived, and may, indeed, never do so.” As the viewer’s gaze ranges flat and wide over Hynes’s action, it does feel distinctly for one night as though the cameras were missing, or had never been invented. Unlike with the screen, or admittedly in the vast majority of plays whose stagecraft parasitically derives from TV exigencies, you’re never forced, or even allowed, to take in only one performer at a time. Is “Godot” film? Add that to the innumerable list of nonanswers, why don’t you.
“How time flies when one has fun!” Vladimir’s jet-black chortle or blurt is what I—and what had to be the majority of my fellow playgoers on Navy Pier—had literally to say for ourselves at the end of the show’s two hours and thirty minutes. We walked out of this magisterial Godot and into the shock of a gaudy fireworks display over Lake Michigan for Memorial Day. I don’t know whether the boats waited for the end of the performance to start shooting off their cracklers and dahlias. But the juxtaposition was memorable.
Notes
[1] This phrase is from Beckett’s letters; it occurs in a description he once gave of the painter Jack B. Yeats’s portrait style: “The way he puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between” (SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937]). The resemblance this quality of figural isolation in Yeats’s art might bear to the playwright’s later works has often been suggested.
June 2018