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by Samuel Beckett, directed by Molly Atkinson

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

May 30–July 31, 2026

Estragon: “There is no lack of void”

The Stratford Festival has concluded its opening week on a sour note. Its production of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is one of the worse of the nine productions I’ve seen. The Festival Theatre is the wrong venue for such an intimate play, the director pays little attention to the text, the cast is riven with inconsistent acting styles and there are flaws in the design.

This is the first time Stratford has staged Godot at the Festival Theatre. Previous productions have been at the Avon or more often at the Tom Patterson Theatre. The play is essentially a two-hander with two extended visits by two more characters and two short visits by a fifth character. Godot is a minimalist play and has the greatest impact in a small theatre. Every nuance of the text needs to be heard and the smallest facial expressions of the cast need to be seen. This is impossible to achieve in the 1,826-seat Festival Theatre.

This situation might be tolerable if the acting were compelling, but under Molly Atkinson’s insightless direction it emphatically is not. Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps who are so futilely waiting for Godot, have been friends for over 50 years and got to know each other while picking grapes in the Mâcon country in France, a region known for Chardonnay. The pair have spent their lives together and therefore should have some rapport.

In this production they have none. Tom McCamus is familiar with the play, having played Vladimir in the famed Stratford production of 1996 and its revival in 1998. He now plays Estragon for the first time but is the only one in the cast fully imbued with the tragicomic nature of Beckett’s tramps and the style of Beckett’s absurdist dialogue.

Paul Gross in his first excursion into Beckett appears to have no clue what the nature of his character is or how to play it. He doesn’t give the feeling of being Estragon’s age-old companion, and he delivers his lines as if he were in a play by Noel Coward. Beckett’s lines for Vladimir are not meant to be tossed off as sparkling repartee but rather a grim irony born of years of suffering.

Vladimir and Estragon are meant to be nearly identical, except where they feel their pain – Vladimir with his hat, Estragon with his boots. In Atkinson’s production the two are completely different. McCamus knows how to project so that every word is heard, even if whispered. Gross does not do this and thus much of his dialogue is lost. McCamus presents Estragon as a grubby man plagued with lack of sleep. Gross should present Vladimir as a an equally grubby man plagued with bouts of urinary urgency. To indicate this, Beckett describes Vladimir as “advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart”. Atkinson and Gross ignore this. Gross walks normally, with an erect posture as if he had no medical problem or even any effects of age.

In fact, even though the two are meant to be the same age, Gross seems intent on making Vladimir appears younger and fitter than Estragon, which is totally not the point. As Estragon, McCamus obsessively inspects his boots. Vladimir is supposed to inspect his hat just as obsessively, but Gross does so as if it were an afterthought. McCamus is able to imbue his words with a sound of a lifetime of suffering. Gross is often unable to imbue his words with any feeling at all. This is painfully true when Vladimir, on seeing the fallen Pozzo and Lucky, delivers his most famous speech: “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. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!” Incredibly, Gross delivers these key lines without a sense of revelation, urgency or compassion. As through most of the play, Gross may as well be reciting a list of Canada’s major exports.

Aiding the mistaken notion that the two should be perceived as different, designer Cory Sincennes has glad Estragon in the traditional baggy pants, baggy stained shirt and dark torn, moth-eaten coat. He gives Estragon a fedora rather than the usual bowler. In every previous production I’ve seen Vladimir is dressed the same way. Here, however, Sincennes gives him light-coloured pants, vest and long cloth duster, all minimally stained and worn. When Vladimir takes off his duster, we see that his jacket and vest are part of a tailored three-piece suit. So, given that the pair are meant to have exactly the same past history, how is it that Estragon’s clothing is grubbier, cheaper and more worn than Vladimir’s?

Given that Gross does not appear to be inside his role in any way, it is no surprise that their speech does not follow any of the patterns Beckett has set up. Speaking of Pozzo’s oration, Vladimir says, “Worse than the pantomime”, Estragon: “The circus”, Vladimir: “The music-hall”, Estragon: “The circus”. These repetitive patterns that go nowhere, Estragon always repeating the same word, figure throughout the play and are part of a general rhythm in the communication between Vladimir and Estragon that becomes a kind of poetry. Because Atkinson does not know how to encourage this rhythm and Gross appears unaware of it, Beckett’s language completely loses its chantlike rhythm that raises its seemingly pointless dialogue into a kind of lament or poetry of despair.

The arrival of Pozzo and Lucky should create a noticeable change of tone from the melancholy playfulness of Vladimir and Estragon to the brutal master-slave relationship of the newcomers. Since Atkinson establishes no general tone with Vladimir and Estragon, the arrival of Pozzo and Lucky has nothing to contrast with.

Sincennes has clad Jonathan Goad as Pozzo in a red wool three-piece suit with matching bowler and David W. Keeley as Lucky as a replica of Estragon with ragged, baggy pants and shirt and a battered fedora, only larger. Goad certainly knows how to project, but, unfortunately, he has no idea of what his character is about. Pozzo should be seen as a grandiloquent slave-owner who fancies himself as a great orator. Why else does he carry an atomizer with him to spray his mouth before speeches?

Under Atkinson’s direction, Goad bizarrely downplays all of Pozzo’s frightening aspects to appear more like Vladimir and Estragon with more vigour and a stronger sense of purpose. The text shows why this approach is wrongheaded. Why otherwise are Vladimir and Estragon so appalled by Pozzo and his behaviour?

Lucky is usually portrayed as tall, and skinny as if he had not eaten for months and was worn down by carrying his master’s suitcase and basket. Keeley, tall and muscular, does not look like the typical Lucky at all except for his head of long, grey hair. While Goad and Keeley well play the roles of master and slave, Atkinson again seems not ignore key aspects of the text. When Lucky dances, Pozzo tells us the dance is called “The Net” because Lucky mimes being caught in a net. Yet, the dance Atkinson has devised looks nothing like that nor could be mistaken for “The Hard Stool” as Vladimir supposes.

Keeley does a great job of speaking Lucky’s now-famous nonstop nonsense speech, but Atkinson misses significant details within it. She does not know that Bishop Berkeley’s last name should be pronounced “Bark-lee”, important for the play since Berkeley (1685-1753) theorized that everything we see is an illusion. She also directed Keeley to feign stuttering when saying “Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry”, not realizing these must be fully pronounced to bring out their scatological humour in this satire of academic discourse.

A serious mistake Atkinson makes is in allowing Vladimir and Estragon to exit and enter the stage at will. Anyone who reads the play will note that Estragon is discovered on the stage and never leaves it during the course of the play, while Vladimir leaves the stage only when he has to pee. In terms of symbolism, it is important that Estragon cannot leave the stage (the fate of most of Beckett’s future characters) and that Vladimir won’t leave because he will only willingly leave, for non-urgency reasons, with Estragon. Instead of making this key point, Atkinson has the two race all over the stage and into and out of the backstage and voms. This gives the two the look of a freedom to move and leave that the text repeated implies they do not have. It makes nonsense of the fact that they claim they are out of shape and can’t do their exercises, Worse, it makes the nonsense of the ending of both acts: “Vladimir: Let’s go. They do not move”.

Atkinson ignores the text in terms of lighting. Pozzo states exactly how night arrives: “night is charging … and will burst upon us (snaps his fingers) pop!” Instead, Atkinson has lighting designer Jareth Li do a fade-out of stage lights with a simultaneous fade-in of a large moon. Li could easily do a “pop!” as I’ve seen other designers do for Godot.

Atkinson has a further terrible idea that I’ve never experienced at Godot before. She has composer and sound designer Alessandro Juliani’s upbeat music play while the audience is being seated, at intermission and during and after final bows. It’s not merely the fact the music is upbeat that is inappropriate. It’s the use of external music of any kind.

The play repeatedly emphasizes that there is nothing anywhere. The only sounds are the crashes of Pozzo and Lucky falling over, or, especially crucial in Beckett, the sounds of the characters’ voices. Beckett later constructed an entire play, Not I (1972), around this very principle. In Beckett speaking and being heard, like seeing and being seen, is a sign of existence. To introduce any other sound is to display a profound ignorance of the playwright and his works.

At least Gordon Paul Miller as the Boy gives a fine uncompromised performance.

There have been fine Godots recently such as that at the Coal Mine Theatre just last year. I would advise giving this misconceived Godot a miss and waiting for a better Godot.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Tom McCamus as Estragon and Paul Gross as Vladimir; Tom McCamus as Estragon and Paul Gross as Vladimir; Tom McCamus as Estragon and Paul Gross as Vladimir; Tom McCamus as Estragon, Paul Gross as Vladimir and Jonathan Goad as Pozzo; Tom McCamus as Estragon, David W. Keeley as Lucky and Paul Gross as Vladimir. © 2026 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca