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by Samuel Beckett, directed by Kelli Fox

Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

September 18-October 12, 2025

Vladimir: “All mankind is us, whether we like it or not”

Coal Mine Theatre’s first-ever production of a play by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, is well worth seeing even if you have seen the play many times before. This is the eighth production I have seen and I found that director Kelli Fox and her actors underscored aspects of the play that I had not noticed before. Not all of Fox’s choices are helpful, but achieving perfection with such a multivalent text is likely impossible. The design is smart and while two of the actors fully embody conventional views of their roles, the two others give new spins to their roles that show there are more ways to interpret Beckett’s text that we may have thought.

One of the best aspects of the production is its set. Beckett’s entire description of the location of the action is “A country road. A tree”. The question that this vague description poses is how far to reflect in the design the play’s frequent reference to an audience – “that bog” or “Where are all these corpses from?” The best solution was in the Godot directed by Brian Bedford at Stratford in 1996 which set the action in an abandoned music hall. That choice also amplified all the vaudeville routines of Vladimir and Estragon and underlined the role of Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky as performers.

Set designer Scott Penner does not have his set evoke an actual theatre. Rather he has created a set that looks like a set. It is composed of three walls, the right and left pierced by a door-like opening. The key feature of this set is that the walls do noy meet, leaving an open space where they ought to join. This means that the audience can see actors behind the set before they enter, a fact the emphasizes the play’s theatrical artifice.

Costume designer Ming Wong follows conventional notions of how the four adult characters should be clad, making them all look like tramps with soiled and fraying pants, jackets and hats. Pozzo seems to have come from a more privileged background than Vladimir and Estragon since he possesses a long outer coat, a Half Hunter pocket watch, a meerschaum pipe and a lunch basket. The Boy, however, who says he works for Mr. Godot, wears clean, non-broken down clothing suggesting that somewhere in what appears a post-apocalyptic world, someone is still well-off.

A key element that director Kelli Fox gets exactly right is the relation of the central pair of Vladimir and Estragon to the visiting pair of Pozzo and Lucky. Vladimir and Estragon’s life in this wasteland seems rather grim. Estragon’s feet always hurt. Vladimir suffers from painful urination. All Estragon has to eat is the odd root vegetable that Vladimir happens to have with him. Estragon frequently thinks of leaving Vladimir but never does. They have been with each other for fifty years. They may stay with each other out of habit, but their relationship continues by mutual consent.

Pozzo and Lucky’s relationship offers a disturbing contrast. They are master and slave with Lucky, rope around his neck, carrying Pozzo’s baggage all the while being verbally abused by his master. Vladimir is horrified by them. As he exclaims, “To treat a man … like that … I think that … no … a human being … no … it’s a scandal!” To counter this Pozzo claims that Lucky acts excessively servile so that Pozzo will not get rid of him, a rather convenient view for a master to have of a slave.

On their second appearance in the play Pozzo and Lucky show in a different way how fortunate Vladimir and Estragon really are. It is not their degenerate personal relationship that is worse but their physical condition. Pozzo has gone blind, and Lucky, who had given the longest continuous speech in the play, has become mute.

By making the contrast between these pairs so clear, Fox brings out one of the main themes of the play that bad as you might think your life, there is always something worse. In King Lear, when Edgar sees the blind Gloucester, he says, “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst?’”

In a minimalist text like Beckett’s, small changes can have major implications. In Act 1 Fox allows Vladimir, Estragon and Pozzo to chase each other around the set, out stage right and in stage left. This is not in the text. The play is about stasis. At the end of Act 1 Vladimir says to Estragon, “Let’s go” and they do not move. At the end of Act 2 Estragon says to Vladimir, “Let’s go” and they do not move. The problem is that having the characters chase about suggests the characters have a freedom to move which the entire rest of the text denies. Only Pozzo and Lucky enter through one door and exit through the other because they are symbols to Vladimir and Estragon of the passage of time.

In Act 2 Vladimir looks at the tree which has been entirely bare in Act 1 and discover it has a few leaves on it now. In the text Estragon looks at the leaves and exclaims, “It must be the Spring”. For unknown reasons, Fox has had a stagehand affix brown leaves on the tree as if it were fall. This choice has the negative effect of making it seem that Estragon doesn’t know one season from the other. It misses the important point that green leaves on the tree would be a sign of hope, and the effect of hope is one of the main themes of the play. After all, why do Vladimir and Estragon stay in the same place day after day except in the hope that Godot will appear? While most people would consider hope a good thing, Beckett exposes hope as a fantasy that prevents human beings from seeing the terrible reality surrounding them. As Nietzsche says in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878), “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man”.

Fox also makes some usual decisions relating to the characters. The character of Estragon she generally leaves alone. Ted Dykstra makes the character both very funny and very natural, reacting spontaneously to events in a childlike and sometimes childish manner. He is a man, much the servants in Roman comedy, for whom physical comfort is the most important thing in life.

In contrast, Fox has Alexander Thomas play Vladimir in quite a different manner than usual. Critics often see Vladimir and Estragon as two parts of the same person, with Estragon as the body (see his preoccupation with his boots) and Vladimir as the head (see his preoccupation with his hat). Here Fox has Thomas speak in a very deliberate manner quite unlike Dykstra’s spontaneity. This is fine in depicting Vladimir’s reflectiveness, but it tends to slow down banter that should be much more rapid.

One of the most important aspects of Vladimir is that he, unlike the other three tramps, begins to conceive of a way to cope with the desolation of living. The way to find purpose in life, as also expounded in Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947), is through helping others. In Act 2 when Pozzo has fallen and cries for help, Vladimir states, “To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not”. This should be Vladimir’s first major revelation, but Thomas plays it as if Vladimir does not quite understand the implications of what he is saying.

Instead, Fox saves Vladimir’s main revelation for Vladimir’s final extended speech in Act 2 as he gazes on the sleeping Estragon, “ Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?… the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener”. Thomas imbues these great lines with abundant empathy that suggests that empathy itself is the way human beings can rise above their shared misery. Since Vladimir’s lines here are clearly a continuation of his thoughts while contemplating Pozzo, I would prefer that Vladimir be played as growing steadily in insight from that earlier moment to this. Yet, it is a pleasure to hear Thomas speak Vladimir’s final lines so well and so full of emotion.

As for Pozzo and Lucky, Fox similarly has one character, Pozzo, played in a conventional style, and the other, Lucky, played in an unconventional manner. Pozzo is an inherently histrionic character, much like a miles gloriosus of Roman comedy, and Jim Mezon plays the role to the hilt. Mezon shows Pozzo to be loud, bombastic, self-dramatizing and ruthlessly tyrannical. One might almost think that Beckett intended him as a satire of certain modern day politicians. Of the eight different productions of Godot that I’ve see, Mezon’s Pozzo is the most terrifying. Yet, as with all tyrants and bullies, Pozzo is essentially weak underneath. Mezon’s Pozzo, egocentric to the last, desires as much attention paid to his suffering in Act 2 as he did to his grandeur in Act 1.

As for Lucky, Pozzo’s slave, Fox leaves the character’s expressionless subservience untouched. She does, however, have Simon Bracken deliver Lucky’s one great speech when he “thinks” aloud in quite a different way than usual. The subject of the speech is the nature of a “personal god”, but its reasoning is so dominated by nonsense that it is almost impossible to understand. Besides this, Pozzo, Vladimir and Estragon stop Lucky from speaking before he reaches his conclusion. In all the previous production of Godot that I’ve seen, Lucky delivers his speech as an uninterrupted torrent of words, as if Pozzo’s command “Think!” turned on a tap of bottled-up ideas and then turns it off.

Fox, in contrast, has Bracken deliver his speech as if he were a university professor who feels compelled to insert all his secondary sources into the body of his speech to the point that the references obscure what he is saying. Bracken’s face suddenly takes on a serious expression, he seems to throw off his weakness and speaks slowly with a full, confident, resonant voice. Kelli’s point would seem to be to show what kind of person Lucky was before he became enslaved. What he says still make almost no sense, but Lucky now appears to us as a completely different and capable person. The question is whether the usual “torrent of words” method or this new “professorial” method is better at communicating the nature of the character. Fox’s method emphasizes what Lucky used to be like but makes it less clear how such a strong person can endure Pozzo’s tyranny. Fox even has Lucky give Pozzo defiant looks during his speech.

The usual method depicts a mind decayed and struggling to sort out what is significant from what is insignificant. Lucky’s speech, if delivered in a nonstop manner then looks forward to Beckett’s play Not I (1972) in which Mouth delivers her speech to a silent Listener as rapidly as possible. The “torrent of words” method when used in Lucky’s speech helps boost it to become a theatrical tour-de-force. Nevertheless, I was pleased to see Fox’s interpretation since it, too, is valid despite being so different.

The role of the Boy is played perfectly by 9-year-old Kole Parks who answers all of Vladimir’s questions with a mix of innocence and earnestness. The fact that Beckett has Godot send a small boy as messenger suggests that there is a reality beyond the ken of the four tramps that they will never know.

If you are already familiar with Waiting for Godot, the great virtue of this production, besides Mezon’s tremendous performance as Pozzo, is that it will make you rethink key passages in the play. Beckett is not usually a writer whose works relate to current topics, but Vladimir’s abhorrence of Pozzo’s enslaving of Lucky strikes a contemporary chord as people around the world fall to the tyranny of others. Vladimir’s realization that empathy may be the way to find meaning in a meaningless world does not sound like the fantasy of a tramp trying to cheer himself up, but a plea for human decency that presently seems in such rapid decline.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Ted Dykstra as Estragon and Alexander Thomas as Vladimir; Simon Bracken as Lucky, Jim Mezon as Pozzo, Ted Dykstra as Estragon and Alexander Thomas as Vladimir; Ted Dykstra as Estragon, Jim Mezon as Pozzo and Alexander Thomas as Vladimir; Ted Dykstra as Estragon and Simon Bracken as Lucky. © 2025 Elana Emer.

For tickets visit: www.coalminetheatre.com.