Waiting for Godot, Lyceum, Edinburgh, review: 'Puts both the pleasure and the pain into the endless waiting'

Garry Hynes’s finely calibrated comic revival, produced by the Irish company Druid, is part of the Edinburgh International Festival

Theatre’s most celebrated no-show: Waiting for Godot at Edinburgh's Lyceum, part of the Edinburgh International Festival (Photography by Ryan Buchanan)

“Nothing happens,” says Estragon. “Nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” When Beckett’s teasing puzzle of a play received its British premiere in 1955 many thought it was awful. Bernard Levin dismissed it as “twaddle”.

But theatre’s most celebrated no-show proved a game changer for British theatre, far more influential in the long term than John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and far more enduring. Peer beyond the Lyceum walls to the hundreds of companies currently performing around the city on the fringe, and 60 years on you will see the spirit of Beckett is still very much alive in the work of the latest generation of theatre makers.

Garry Hynes’s finely calibrated, often ferociously comic revival, produced by the Irish company Druid, and arriving in Edinburgh as part of the International Festival, puts both the pleasure and the pain into the endless waiting.

In the absence of a piece of rope long enough to hang themselves all they have is each other (Ryan Buchanan)

Marty Rea’s Vladimir and Aaron Monaghan’s Estragon are not so much a double act as a mismatched pair thrown together by circumstance and years later still trying to make the best of it; constantly defeated and constantly going on in a world where even taking off your boots requires a supreme effort.

Vladimir, or Didi as he is often called, is as thin as a ragged piece of paper and Estragon, nicknamed Gogo, is as short and stubby as a worn out pencil. In the absence of a piece of rope long enough to hang themselves all they have is each other. When Didi clasps Gogo’s hand in his it is with the firm tenderness of a father dealing with a recalcitrant toddler. It tickles the throat.

This pair may look like gentlemen travellers of the road from a bygone era, but Francis O’Connor’s design places them in a timeless landscape – where a rock looks like an egg and a moon like a child’s drawing – which could be here or there, then or now. There is a nod towards the contemporary which suggests more now than then.

Framed by a luminous white light, the stage is a kind of prison, one from which there is no escape and on which Didi and Gogo are constantly called to perform. Behind them is a faceless concrete wall which offers no way out, and when they peer out into the darkness towards the audience they see nothing but dead.

Hynes does not over-egg it, but Didi and Gogo’s endless waiting – whether for deliverance or new disaster – takes on extra poignancy in the light of contemporary political developments which leave millions waiting at borders, or behind real and invisible walls. Every single one of them hoping without hope, just like Didi and Gogo, that the word will come today that means they can stop waiting in limbo and begin life afresh.

Hynes finds both the psychic pain and the physical comedy in this situation. The horror too, as Rory Nolan’s preening prima donna bully, Pozzo, passes by with his unfortunate whipping boy, Lucky (Garrett Lombard). There are moments when the slapstick comedy is a little too broad, but there’s no argument that the evening’s desperate, jaunty despair is heartbreakingly entertaining.

Until 12 August. 0131 473 2000, www.eif.co.uk