Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Caroline Stacey, The Street Theatre. Nov 9-24.

No doubt it’s a classic. 

Two down at heels wanderers, Vladimir ( Christopher Samuel Carroll) and Estragon ( P.J. Williams) lurk around a roadside near a bare tree waiting for a mysterious bloke called Godot. They encounter the urbane Pozzo (Craig Alexander) and his slave Lucky  (James Scott) and are visited fleetingly by a Boy (Sterling Notley) who brings messages of a sort from Godot. In the second half of the play the tree puts on a few leaves.  Optimism ebbs and flows. 

Carroll and Williams are an ideal pairing. Carroll’s Vladimir is a tall dreamer, Williams’ rotund Estragon is much more concerned with the state of his feet than matters of existence. 

Alexander is perhaps too understated as Pozzo, disturbing but not quite disturbing enough in his pseudo elegance and real cruelty. Scott as the downtrodden Lucky suffers slavery with stubborn  stoicism behind a ferocious little moustache and infuses his one huge outburst with tremendous (and understandable) tension and anger. 

Spectacular though the set and lighting ( both by Veronique Benett) are, the play does become at times a little lost in the vastness of the main Street stage and auditorium and in the difficulties of reaching all of the audience in a traverse set up.  The tree is abstract and the moon is huge and the path down which the Boy comes trails off to a vanishing point.  Epic images perhaps threaten to overwhelm the text.

However, in the hands of a capable cast, it does more than survive. There’s the humour, there’s the tensions, there’s the excellence of the cast’s presence and teamwork. 

A couple near me did not come back after interval. There is no doubt that Beckett can be  hard work for an audience and not everyone takes to his work. But I have to say he is worth the effort.

 Alanna Maclean