Waiting for Godot
- Linda Isted
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Samuel Beckett
Bolton Octagon, Citizens Theatre Glasgow, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse production
Bolton Octagon
April 15-May 2, 2026; 2hrs 15 mins
For a play that’s all about coming and going (discuss), the Octagon stage presents this masterful production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot with a smorgasbord of ironic opportunities.
Our central characters, abandoned in a wasteland, could escape in any direction if only life, or God, or the universe, or their broken-down boots – or, of course, Godot - would let them.
But Estragon (Matthew Kelly) and Vladimir (George Costigan) are trapped on the stage, literally petrified like the black spar of the dead tree that points defiantly and hopelessly towards the sky. In designer Jean Chan’s vision, the future is a fragile, ripped backdrop through which The Boy crawls nonchalantly back and forth, but which repels our pair of hobos.
Director Dominic Hill gives audience members a worrying amount of latitude to make up their own mind about all the stuff (authentic critical terminology there) wrapped up in the play, routinely described as one of the 20th Century’s foremost masterpieces. There is a shrug of the shoulders, a take-it-or-leave-it approach to the vast philosophical landscape of the play which is refreshing and feels very now.
He also gives us plenty of laughs; like Vladimir comforting Estragon, he rubs our back and gives us permission to go with the flow. Not feeling up to this much existential angst? Never mind, enjoy the carrot and the turnips.
(At this point, becoming a tad paranoid about hidden depths, I wondered about the absence of a potato. Is this relevant? A reference to the Irish potato famine? Or is it just that you could arguably eat both turnip and carrot raw, but never a potato? This is what Beckett does to you.)
The other thing that Beckett does is to make you ask very seriously about misogyny. The female gaze simply does not exist here. Even when Vladimir is caring gently for Estragon, the relationship is comradely, reminiscent of scenes from World War One trenches, with no Edith Cavill in sight. I’m not sure what a more gender-balanced production would look like, but in this one the absence is defiant, and as such, a little uncomfortable.
Much of the comedy falls to our second pairing, Pozzo the slave-master (Gbolahan Obisesan) and the desperate Lucky. Michael Hodgson as the latter spends most of his time crawling abjectly about the stage looking startlingly like Gollum in The Hobbit. He may be the butt of jokes, but then the anxiety hits. The noose around his neck, the gibbet-like nature of the dead tree, what look like crucifixion crosses stretching out into the distance on the backdrop – all horror tropes that bode badly.
By contrast, in his classic, showstopping absurdist monologue, somehow Hodgson makes the mere mention of tennis conjure up the sunny uplands of Noel Coward and EM Forster – a feat indeed.
On the way out of the theatre, I heard someone say: “The acting was brilliant, of course, but I couldn’t get my head round the play.” Can the acting be brilliant without the play? Does a play even really exist without acting? Is existentialism contagious? And, as a woman, am I immune? So many questions…
More info and tickets here
