Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✩✩✩
by Brendan Gall, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
April 30-June 1, 2008
Brendan Gall’s Alias Godot is the kind of show that could be lots of fun if it were an improv sketch. “Show why Godot never arrives in Waiting for Godot,” someone might call out and the troupe proceeds to show us the bowler-hatted Godot being detained and questioned by two corrupt cops, incongruously enough, in modern-day New York. It would be funny in a stupid kind of way, but then we’d move on to the next sketch. Unfortunately, Gall’s play is two hours long--about four times the length a two-joke comedy should be. The first joke is his mundane explanation of Godot absence from Beckett’s play. The second is that Gall’s play echos all the main events of Beckett’s. Since Gall has no new insight on Beckett’s play, we have to wonder what the point is of watching a great play diluted via television cop shows instead of watching the real thing.
Beckett’s tramps Vladimir and Estragon are now the cops Vince (David Ferry) and Eddie (Paul Braunstein), who have captured the mysterious Godot (Alon Nashman) because he may have witnessed one of their illicit activities. As in Beckett’s their proceedings are interrupted by the unexplained arrival of Pozzo and Lucky-equivalents Rocco (Tony Nappo) and Linus (Geoffrey Pounsett), of the Domestic Terrorism Unit, where Linus is Rocco’s silent gofer except for a single virtuoso speech, not about “thinking” as in Beckett, but about police rules and regulation. As in Beckett, Eddie is beaten nightly, a tree, here a hatstand, glows leaves overnight and, despite Godot’s presence, the fate of Vince and Eddie is dependent on an elusive never-seen figure called Jimmy Nicknames.
While Braunstein and Pounsett seems to be playing real characters, Ferry and Nappo are in over-the-top sketch comedy mode. Nashman is the calm enigmatic centre of the play but attempts to give him magic powers to show that her could escape if he so wished falls into the old “Godot is God” equation that Beckett always rejected and that makes nonsense of Gall’s plot.
In a play like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967), Tom Stoppard used a focus on minor characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to show how a different point of view can make us see tragic events as comic and vice versa. In contrast, Gall’s Alias Godot is simply an homage to Beckett’s play that neither illuminates it nor stands on its own. If Gall means to show that Beckettian occurrences can happen even today, the universality of Beckett’s play already covers that possibility.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-05-01.
Photo: David Ferry, Alon Nashman, Paul Braunstein, Tony Nappo, Geoffrey Pounsett.
©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2008-05-01
Alias Godot