The Stage

Waiting for Godot

Published Thursday 9 February 2012 at 10:25 by Mark Shenton

Waiting for Godot may still famously be “a play in which nothing happens, twice” (in the words of literary critic Vivian Mercer), but this West Yorkshire Playhouse/Talawa co-production achieves a rare first with this almost over-familiar classic by casting it for the first time in the UK with an all-black cast.

Jeffery Kissoon (Vladimir), Patrick Robinson (Estragon) in Waiting for Godot at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

Beckett’s bleak howl of existential despair can make you howl for the existence of this play, but here the cast make you applaud. And not just, as I often feel, because the play has actually ended (unlike life, which seems to go on and on), but because they have given it fresh and illuminating life instead.

Ian Brown’s starkly austere staging may offer the theatrical cliche of presenting it as a kind of theatrical vaudeville with old-fashioned footlights at the front of the stage and the skeleton of a tree pushing through the floorboards of the stage that split it open. But these actors burst the play apart, too, replacing the Irish lilt with which it is often played with a specifically West Indian one. “Nuttin to be done” become the first words spoken, and this play of the consolations of companionship and conversation is given fresh rhythms and universality.

The dishevelled, disheartened duo of Patrick Robinson and Jeffery Kissoon bring plenty of bumbling charm and humour to Estragon and Vladimir, locked in their endless cycles of chatter, distraction and consuming of carrots and turnips. But the revelation here is how Cornell S John and Guy Burgess bring real pathos to the fragile journey of the other couple, a controlling tyrant called Pozzo and his unlucky menial who is ironically called Lucky, whose mutually destructive plight is a such a rich and haunting parable of the human condition.