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by Samuel Beckett, directed by Jennifer Tarver

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

June 27-September 26, 2013

Vladimir: “I’ve been better entertained”

Stratford’s fourth staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is over-produced and only two of the four major performances are noteworthy.  This is strange since Jennifer Tarver has directed excellent productions of Beckett in the past – a collection of five Beckett shorts in 2004 and Krapp’s Last Tape at Stratford in 2008.  Yet here she makes some odd directorial choices and does not dig very deeply into the text.

Beckett is a minimalist author.  He gives the location of the action as “A country road.  A tree.”  In his first stage direction he mentions that Estragon is sitting in “on a low mound”.  Those three items on a bare stage plus the moon that suddenly appears near the end of each act are all that is all that is required for a production of Waiting for Godot.  Yet, Stratford is keen to provide production values even when they are not only not required but contrary to the esthetic of the work.  Tarver has had Teresa Przybylski build a set with a narrow road raised up about a foot-and-a-half from the stage floor and extending from upstage left diagonally to downstage right.  The rest of the stage floor and the rise up to the “road” is covered in glossy black vinyl.  The image this creates is less of a road than of a narrow bridge hanging over an abyss.  That would be a good metaphor for Beckett’s view of human life except that Tarver has Vladimir and Estragon walk on the glossy black floor at one point, destroying any notion that it represents the “Void”.  Besides being needlessly elaborate, the raised country road also significantly restricts the playing area for the action, with characters having to move awkwardly past each other on the narrow strip. 

For unknown reasons the tree is made out of metal tubes and looks more like an expensive sculpture of a tree than the stage tree it should be.  Since Vladimir and Estragon frequently fantasize about hanging themselves from the tree the usual convention is to make the tree obviously flimsy to bring out both the comedy and hopelessness of their fantasy.  The problem with Przybylski’s metal tree is that it looks so sturdy, a person actually could hang himself from it, thus destroying its comic possibilities.               

As for the moon, Tarver curiously allows it to be visible throughout the action.  Pozzo describes the onset of night as sudden, “... behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging ... and will burst upon us ... pop! like that! ... just when we least expect it”.  Beckett’s own stage directions say, “The light suddenly fails. In a moment it is night. The moon rises at back, mounts in the sky, stands still, shedding a pale light on the scene”.  Tarver begins the play with the moon, represented by what looks a translucent globe filled with clear plastic bags, and has a mechanical arm above the stage move it from its position behind the tree 180º to a point downstage left of the tree, but still visible.  This movement is accompanied by a sound of old cranks and gears turning.  When night falls, Tarver has a sound cue resembling a power switch being slammed off and the moon glides its 180º back into place, a lamp inside lighting up. 

The point of the bizarre set-up is to suggest that Beckett’s tramps are trapped in a decaying mechanical universe, but if you’re going to suggest that you might as well get the mechanics right.  The circling moon glowing from within confounds the idea of the sun and the moon and turns the world of the play into a pre-Copernican, geocentric universe which runs contrary to Beckett’s notion of human insignificance.  Beckett is not very kind to lighting designers since he asks for so few lighting cues.  Here all one needs is day, moonlight and a blackout.  Tarver, however, allows Kimberly Purtell to have lights rise and dim throughout the action especially highlighting those who are speaking.  This is all very artful but again completely unnecessary and undercuts the notion that the two tramps are living in a harsh environment, better signified by an unwaveringly steady light.

Sound cues are also unnecessary, yet Tarver has had Jesse Ash create a noise that sounds like a strong wind but is in reality made up of indistinct voices.  This picks up on an exchange between Vladimir and Estragon in Act 2: “All the dead voices.  They make a noise like wings.  Like leaves.... They all speak at once.  Each one to itself.  Rather they whisper.  They rustle”.  While this is as beautifully done as Purtell’s lighting, it is also unnecessary.  Do we really need to hear the sound the two are describing rather than imagine it from the poetry of Beckett’s text?  I think not.

While most productions set the action of Godot in a post-apocalyptic landscape, like the first two Stratford productions in 1968 and 1984, Brian Bedford’s brilliant production in 1996 set it in a run-down musical hall which perfectly suited the series of music hall routines that inform Vladimir and Estragon’s interactions.  Here Tarver’s production does not send out a unified signal.  The naturalistic road and stone contrast with the deliberately artificial tree and moon while the light switch sound wants to evoke the theatre.    

As with a production composed of disparate elements, so is the acting Tarver draws from the cast.  The greatest problem is the contrast between the performances of Tom Rooney as Vladimir and Stephen Ouimette as Estragon.  Ouimette played Estragon in the 1996 production and has a deep understanding of the role.  He brings out every nuance of his lines and is expert at conveying the mixture of comedy and pathos of his character.  Rooney, however, gives a very superficial, not always clearly enunciated reading of his lines and barely makes the effort to change his tone to match Vladimir’s change of moods from playful to reflective.  Vladimir’s key speech in Act 2, “It is not every day that we are needed”, he completely throws away in the same flat voice he uses throughout.  While Ouimette shows the toll that pointless waiting has taken on Estragon, Rooney shows nothing.  Ideally, Vladimir should express an optimism in the future that he no longer believes, hoping only that it will buoy Estragon’s spirits.  Rooney misses that layer and lets us believe Vladimir’s optimism is genuine.  One can even see the difference between Ouimette and Rooney when their characters are silently looking on at Pozzo and Lucky.  A whole range of emotions plays over Ouimette’s face while Rooney’s remains a blank. 

The result of this contrast is an overturning of the usual relationship between Vladimir and Estragon.  The first is supposed to be the intellectual in charge, the second the pragmatist who follows, rather like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  Because Ouimette shows so much more expertise in communicating the meaning of his lines, Estragon rather than Vladimir seems to be the one in charge. 

The same difference in engagement is apparent between Brian Dennehy’s Pozzo and Randy Hughson’s Lucky.  All that Dennehy gets out of Pozzo is that he is a bully completely unconscious of any immorality in treating Lucky as a slave.  He shouts, he mumbles, but his characterization is superficial.  What ought to be obvious is that Pozzo is also an actor.  After his explanation of twilight in Act 1, Pozzo asks for a critique on his performance: “How did you find me? ... Good? Fair? Middling? Poor? Positively bad?” and admits, “I weakened a little towards the end, you didn't notice?”  James Blendick made much of this aspect of Pozzo in 1996 as did Joseph Ziegler in Soulpepper’s production in 2004.  The notion that Pozzo is not simply a bully as much as playing the role of aristocrat is completely lost here along with the atomizer Pozzo should have as a prop. 

Hughson, however, is marvellous as Lucky, looking like the most wretched being on earth.  His forgetfulness is funny but Hughson makes us see it as the product of a mind worn down by the tedium of useless toil.  Hughson’s delivery of Lucky’s one long speech is a wonder.  Tarver does not have him speak it as rapidly as possible, but slowly as if Lucky really does have a message to communicate.  As he goes on we come to think that we are close to grasping what he is trying to say only to have it slip away buried beneath a pile of repetition and miscellanea.  Also noteworthy is Noah Jalava in the role of the Boy.  He speaks his lines clearly and embodies in his candour and simplicity all the innocence that the other characters have lost.

Anyone who saw Stratford’s previous three productions or Godot or who saw Soulpepper’s 2004 production should feel no great need to see the current production because it sheds no new light on the work and does not present it as clearly or dig as deeply as the others.  Those who have never read or seen the play before will find Tarver has made the play entertaining enough that she banishes any notion of the play being “difficult”.  With that notion, she also banishes any idea of why this play where nothing happens should be revered as one of the greatest works of the last century.  The performance I attended happened to be filled with a large contingent of students.  While some of the older audience members left at intermission or fell asleep, the students clearly got the play’s bleak humour and really enjoyed the performance.  If Tarver, however imperfectly, is able to make Beckett speak to the younger generation, she has done an important service.           

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Stephen Ouimette as Estragon and Tom Rooney as Vladimir; (middle) Randy Hughson as Lucky.  ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.