Waiting for Godot Reviews Round-up – Starring Ben Whishaw & Lucian Msamati

"Five stars for a stunning Waiting for Godot with Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati "

"James Macdonald captures the play’s emotional depth and its political power at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket"

"My word, they’ve been waiting a long time. It’s 71 years since Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon first parked themselves beneath that spartan tree in expectation of a visit from the mysterious Godot and, without doing anything very much, changed the landscape of live theatre forever. And here they still are. Turning up nightly in the hope of something better. One joy in James Macdonald’s superb new production — led by stunning performances from Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati — is that it honours, so eloquently, the irony in that. I’ve never seen the play’s dance along the border between artifice and truth so meaningfully executed. Macdonald and his team relish the play’s philosophical brilliance and emotional depth while underscoring its chastening political power. “Nobody ever recognises us,” says Vladimir tartly. On the one hand, it’s sharply fresh, tweaked in appearance to speak to our precarious times."

"Canny double act cut through haunting absurdity"

"Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati are a tremendous pairing in James Macdonald’s production of the Samuel Beckett classic"

"One thing you can say with certainty about James Macdonald’s utterly compelling pairing of Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati is that it doesn’t overplay the wayward vaudevillian spirit that’s marked some recent revivals. Comedians Robin Williams and Steve Martin took that trait to extremes in New York back in the 1980s. There’s still lots of laughter in the dark at the Haymarket, but even if the press-night audience was ready — too ready, perhaps — to be amused, Whishaw and Msamati never seemed to be playing to the gallery. Theirs is a beautifully paced double act in which the music hall humour is astutely balanced with dizzying glimpses into the existential abyss."

"The best staging of this challenging classic I’ve ever seen"

"Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati take this production to a whole new level"

"Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati bring a potent, tragicomic chemistry to James Macdonald’s rich revival of Samuel Beckett’s challenging play."

"I’ve seen many fine duos play the leads but this time I enjoyed and understood the play on a whole new level. Macdonald also draws superb performances from Jonathan Slinger and Tom Edden as Pozzo and Lucky, the rich man and his slave who distract and disturb the bickering vagrants."

"“Nothing happens, twice,” was the infamous verdict of Irish critic Vivian Mercier on Godot in 1956. But in Macdonald’s production it feels like human existence is distilled, albeit from the exclusively male perspective of the Forties and Fifties. Still difficult, still challenging, Godot isn’t for everyone. But this is the best production I’ve ever seen."

"Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati shine in James Macdonald’s tender take on Beckett’s existential masterpiece"

"James Macdonald’s production unfolds exactly as you’d expect... What I think Macdonald does well is infuse a sort of skewiff naturalism into Beckett’s strictly defined parameters. Whishaw and Msamati are a lovely double act"

"And there is - dare I say it - a little innovation here. The Beckett estate has allowed some deviation from Vladimir and Estragon’s usual uniform of bowler hats and shabby suits in smaller past production. But it’s a big deal that it also happens in the first West End production of the play in over a decade."

"Again, it’s a brilliant play, that you can’t do a lot to. The performances are the big thing and here they’re acerbically funny and infinitesimally tender, something backed up by the low key humanity of Macdonald’s production. In a way we’re all kind of waiting for Godot (to fall out of copyright), but productions like this make the wait a pleasure."

"Tremendous Ben Whishaw leads a night of plentiful horrors"

"This revival of Beckett’s masterpiece dares you to struggle against the dark"

"Performed with ludic clarity on a nuclear winter ridge of rock, a petrified bare-branched tree the only sign of life, MacDonald’s capacious revival offers no new radical insight. Rather its strength lies in its resistance to any specific reading while simultaneously appearing to contain many."

"Whishaw’s tremendous Vladimir is part man-child, part strident philosopher, part Pollyanna, his sparrow-like brightness barely concealing a desperate need to cling on to the certainty that Godot will arrive tomorrow, his long pianist hands forever madly gesticulating in hope. For his part Msamati’s buttoned up Estragon spends quite a lot of time with his head in his hands, his taciturn sulk not quite disguising the suggestion of some deep internal damage. The irritable tenderness between them is palpable."

"Ben Whishaw brings Paddington-esque wistfulness to Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy"

"Whishaw and Lucian Msamati do well to fill the shoes of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart who last starred in the West End production 15 years ago"

"A brooding cloud of torpor hangs thickly above Samuel Beckett’s revolutionary 1953 classic, one that’s famous for its frustrating pauses and pin-drop silences. Yet although it has its fair share of waiting, director James MacDonald’s new West End staging is a comparative breeze – its starry central duo Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati swap hats and tumble across the stage, giving jaunty nods to the music hall performers that influenced Beckett’s offbeat wit."

"Sometimes, it feels like MacDonald’s production could sit a bit longer with this play’s discomfiting moments, especially in the first act. But its power builds after the interval, swelling into existential gloom as Beckett’s text teases us with lines that constantly prod at the directionlessness of both his play, and the audience watching it: "Let us not waste our time in idle discourse," says Vladimir, witlessly doing just that."

"If you think you don’t like Waiting for Godot, Ben Whishaw will prove you wrong"

"It is thrilling to have the opportunity to study this incomparable and mercurial actor live once again, after a brief run in the underwhelming Bluets at the Royal Court earlier this year. Here Whishaw, gentle of voice as ever, teams up to form a fine double act with Lucian Msamati"

"James Macdonald’s production, unfolding in the obligatory barren landscape with a blasted tree, is smooth and confident with welcome shafts of humour, but there can be no escaping the fact that Godot is long and gruelling in its repetitions and reiterations. Occasional moments of a trance-like state for audience members are to be expected."

"Whishaw’s wistful air of an innocent abroad is something he shares with Mark Rylance and I couldn’t help but think what a treat it would be to see these two paired in a major production. Theatre must wait for that, while Vladimir, Estragon and all of us wait for our own personal Godot, whatever or whoever that might be."

"Tragic, absorbing and coolly compassionate"

"Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati give precision-tooled performances in a delicate and desolate production of Beckett’s seminal drama"

"All the inconsequentiality and immensity of our brief lives is here, and James Macdonald’s production conveys both the agony and the absurdity of the human condition with cool compassion. There is laughter, but it’s delicate and desolate. And the performances, led by Ben Whishaw as Vladimir and Lucian Msamati as Estragon, are precision-tooled."

"There’s no escaping, in Macdonald’s astute production, the awareness that we are gazing into a cracked and smeared mirror, at ourselves and our ceaseless beetling about on what Pozzo calls “this bitch of an earth”. It’s not, perhaps, a revelatory staging, and its measured pacing demands patience and close attention. But as sensitively handled as it is here, the play is at once tragic, absorbing and oddly comforting, an assertion not only of our helpless ephemerality, but of our simple common humanity."

"Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati add star power to James Macdonald’s thoughtful Beckett"

"... the ingenious James Macdonald directs a terrific cast – pivoting around Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw – in Samuel Beckett’s most celebrated, seismically disrupting play. It is the play of Beckett’s that I like least."

"... anyone interested in the theatre will want to see Macdonald’s intricate, thoughtful staging. Whishaw is finely doleful and musing, in uneasy repose like a dancer who has alighted from a leap; the grittier Msamati has a beautiful sardonic grace, spoofing his words with a wave of the hand. Tom Edden’s Lucky is an excellent jangled marionette, mesmerising in his jabbering eloquence; Jonathan Slinger is precise and sinister as a spivvy Pozzo."

"It’s almost seventy years since the 1955 premiere of Waiting for Godot in Britain, when it was greeted with boredom and incomprehension. Yet in this new production starring Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw as the two tramps Estragon and Vladimir, Samuel Beckett’s first masterpiece gleams more brightly than ever."

"The entire production has that same clarity and thoughtfulness, a way of shining a spotlight on Beckett’s language and philosophy in ways that make it both profoundly funny and infinitely sad, that force you to listen and consider. Wonderful."

"Beckett’s classic tragicomedy is more comedic than tragic"

"James Macdonald’s production sacrifices tension for slapstick but ultimately delivers pathos"

"In James Macdonald’s production, the drama between Estragon (Lucian Msamati) and Vladimir (Ben Whishaw), who are yoked together in unspoken bondage as they wait for Godot, seems greater parts comedy than tragedy."

"Silence does leak in, but not often enough in the first act; you wish for more, because the actors are so good whenever the temperature drops and the comedy ebbs. With such fine dramatic actors, why not build more of this edginess?"

"The comedy works in itself, and so do the dramatic moments, but the two seem slightly disconnected."