Finding Wonder in Waiting for Godot at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Rated 🍯🍯🍯🍯🍯

Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati on stage in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Photo by Marc Brenner

If there ever was a play the bee would rather leave its readers to discover alone, it’s Waiting for Godot. How fitting that the bee’s most urgent recommendation is one where words threaten to unravel the magic of what unfolds on stage. For those willing to take the plunge, Beckett’s masterpiece exists in a category of its own—a play that dares you to sit, wait, and bear witness to life in all its senseless, wondrous absurdity.

On a sparse stage populated by two weary, absurdly hopeful tramps, Beckett’s world doesn’t so much offer meaning as it does reflect the desire for meaning back at us. The bee could easily regale you with interpretations of Lucky’s babbling monologue, the ritualized acts of carrot-eating and shoe-removing, and the perplexing business of hats that seem to unlock thoughts as if by magic. And yet, each of these interpretations feels more far-fetched than the last, unraveling the harder one tries to pin them down. Like Didi’s anxious turning of his hat inside-out, trying to shake loose some elusive thought, the bee finds itself rattling around inside Beckett’s details, grasping for sense that is deliberately, tantalizingly just out of reach.

And yet, for all its defiance of sense and structure, Godot has left the bee with a head full of impressions—images and sounds that refuse to settle, as if they’re waiting for something themselves. There’s the pomp and gravity with which Pozzo performs the act of sitting, elevating an everyday action into a bizarre ceremony. The tiny varieties of root vegetables—carrots, radishes, turnips—reduced to morsels in a barren landscape, become cherished treasures in their specificity. And the peculiar, childlike dance of taking off boots, wringing hats, and shaking them as if they hold the secrets of the universe. Perhaps they do. Perhaps they don’t. Each hat, carrot, and shoe in Godot is a world unto itself, as profound or trivial as we choose to make it.

What Beckett gives us is an absurdly blank canvas, onto which we project our fears, our longings, our laughter, and our despair. The two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, seem at first to embody a comical ignorance, fumbling through their endless waiting with the innocence of children. And yet, their bond—the one constant in a world stripped bare—reveals a resilience that is strangely beautiful. Estragon’s discomfort in his boots, Vladimir’s obsessive fiddling with his hat, and their playful but unwavering companionship create a childlike purity, a fragile innocence that the bee found surprisingly moving.

To call Waiting for Godot “stimulating” would be an understatement. It’s a play that turns the mind inside out, blending thoughts and ideas as if through a blender. Each detail invites a kaleidoscope of interpretations, yet resists any single one. In the days after seeing the play, the bee found itself haunted by the small, strange images that had swum before its eyes on stage, each as bizarrely potent in memory as they had been in real time. These images persisted, invading dreams and fueling a strange, lasting affection for Didi and Gogo, two lost souls who, despite everything, keep each other company in the endless wait.

Production image of Waiting for Godot. Photo by Marc Brenner

Godot is a mirror, and what it shows is whatever the viewer brings with them. For some, it’s a bleak indictment of human existence; for others, a whimsical reminder of life’s beautiful nonsense. And that’s the enduring wonder of Beckett’s creation. The more we search for answers, the more the play sidesteps them. To see Waiting for Godot is to be challenged to see profundity in the trivial, and triviality in the profound—a mirror for our own attempts to make sense of a world that, like Beckett’s characters, often leaves us waiting without ever quite knowing what we’re waiting for.

So, if the bee could give any advice, it would be to let Godot wash over you, without agenda, without expectation. It’s a rare thing to find a work of art that offers no handrails, that provides no easy interpretations. Beckett’s play is that rare thing: a celebration of the in-between, a reminder that even in the waiting, the nonsensical, and the absurd, there’s a strange and inexplicable beauty. The bee, for one, is glad it waited.

Five stars, and tremendous love.

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Watched October 2024 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London. Waiting for Godot is booking to 21 December 2024.

The best way to get great seats at a reasonable price is through TodayTix daily rush — tickets go on sale at 10 AM every day and the bee was able to get a wonderful seat for £30.