Review: Waiting for Godot at the Liverpool Everyman *****

It may be a play where, as the tagline goes, “nothing happens…then nothing happens again”, but Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic masterpiece on the human condition is rich in incident and Shakespearean in scope.

And it also fair twangs with vividness and life in this tremendous new co-production between Liverpool, Glasgow Citizen and Bolton Octagon, which features a pair of peerless performances from Everyman alumni Matthew Kelly and George Costigan.

Jean Chan’s frayed set (even the backcloth is raggedy) speaks of desolation; an apocalyptic vista of deserted highway whose only feature is the gnarled remains of a tree trunk around which a battered car door has somehow become entangled.

Macon is mentioned - Beckett’s play was originally written in French and staged in Paris two years before its English language London premiere - but the empty landscape with its eerie changes of light could just as well be in one of America’s many Macon counties. Or indeed, given the two protagonists’ obsession with the Crucifixion, a dusty Calvary.

One thing is certain. It’s a passing through kind of place, albeit one where the bedraggled duo has stopped to wait for…what? Salvation? Do they even know?

What Vladimir (Costigan) and Estragon (Kelly) do know is they are waiting for Godot.

Above: George Costigan (Vladimir) and Matthew Kelly (Estragon) with Gbolahan Obisesan (Pozzo - centre) in Waiting for Godot. Top: Costigan and Kelly. Photos by Mihaela Bodlovic.

Shabby, shambling and gloriously hirsute – both boast luxuriant beards like a couple of old seadogs, ‘Didi’ and ‘Gogo’ may be decrepit down and outs with leaky bladders and blistered feet, seemingly devoid of purpose and existing in a state of existential uncertainty, but they are also natural philosophisers. And very, very funny.

Costigan and Kelly, close friends since they first met at Manchester Poly back in the late 60s - when Kelly was still called Dave, last appeared together on stage in Liverpool in 2003, playing another pair of theatrical itinerants in Of Mice and Men at the Playhouse.

Reunited, the chemistry is palpable and they prove a riveting double act as the bickering but utterly interdependent duo – Costigan Vladimir somehow maintaining a cheery optimism and Kelly’s Estragon morose, lethargic and vulnerably childlike.

While they duel and fratch with frustration and futility, there’s also a playfulness about them, and an unexpected, resonant sense of affection and tenderness at the heart of it all.

Above: Michael Hodgson as Lucky. Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.

That affection is thrown into sharp relief by the second – albeit equally interdependent – partnership which materialises in this bleak nowhere.

The arrival of the grandiose Pozzo (Gbolahan Obisesan) and his tethered slave, the ironically named Lucky (Michael Hodgson), is a temporary diversion for the two relentlessly waiting tramps.

Obisesan is quietly unsettling as the absurdist aristo with a silken tongue but a cruel streak, while Hodgson delivers a moving physical performance as his piteous and tormented victim, a sort of skinny Caliban.

Meanwhile the fifth character, Godot’s messenger ‘The Boy,’ is being shared at the Everyman by three bright actors from YEP, on press night the role being played by Daniel Magill. Oscar Clewley and Oscar McDonnell will also appear during the run.

Back by the lonesome pine...or willow, or whatever it might be, Dominic Hill (who previously directed Costigan in Crime and Punishment at the Playhouse) steers his actors deftly through the subtle tempo changes within a narrative arc that effectively has no beginning and no end, and in what feels like the result of a particularly collaborative and collegial rehearsal process.

In summary, this is a Waiting for Godot that has been well worth the wait.