<b>✭✭✭</b>✩✩
<b>by Samuel Beckett, directed by Rona Waddington
Yes Let’s Go Productions, Toronto Fringe Festival,
Honest Ed’s Underground Parking Lot, Toronto
July 8, 2011: 30 hours starting at 6pm;
July 15, 2011: 54 hours starting at 6pm
</b>
Repeating Beckett’s <i>Waiting For Godot</i> for 30 or 54 hours is a pointless exercise, since the play itself already contains enough repetition to suggest Beckett’s meaning that life is hell without making actors literally endure it.
Under director Rona Waddington the cast tends to ignore Beckett’s significant pauses and to speak the text as ordinary prose rather than the bleak poetry it is, though Eric Craig as Vladimir is more prone to this than is David Christo as Estragon. Yet staging the play on an impromptu stage in an underground parking lot has two unexpected benefits. The resounding echoes reinforce the imagery of the world as a void, and the lack of offstage space, with the actors always in view, underscores the theme of life as theatrical performance.
It’s an experiment worth seeing primarily for the discussions it will provoke.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in <i>NOW Magazine</i>, July 14, 2011.
Photo: David Christo and Eric Craig (stage manager Tracy Lynne Cann in background).
©2011 Corbin Smith.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.fringetoronto.com">www.fringetoronto.com</a>.
<b>2011-07-14</b>
<b>The Godot Cycle</b>