Waiting for Godot Read what the press have to say about the play

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Read what the press have to say about the play

Masterly McKellen glitters in Waiting For Godot revival.

McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant. Rees has created a performance that’s nicely layered - fidgety, taut and vulnerable, but with moments of sententiousness and authority.

McKellen’s performance remains a technical masterclass, and this is an accessible, engaging interpretation of one of the 20th century’s most notorious and influential plays.
London Evening Standard 28.01.2010

McKellen’s Estragon, hauling himself out of the ditch yet again, beaten up last night yet again, has grown even older, more mysterious, more accommodating. He’s like a very old, very wounded, abandoned dog.

He really has gone through the pain barrier whereas Rees is summoning all that famous Nicholas Nickleby energy and optimism for one last hurrah. It’s a wonderful adjustment to the performance, and McKellen seems to be enjoying seeing Rees again after all these years as much as we are. While Ronald Pickup’s Lucky is still jabbering at the end of a long rope, Matthew Kelly - what a great sequence of work this actor is producing - picks up Pozzo’s reins from Simon Callow with a stern and awesome authority, more Victorian but less Dickensian, very frightening.
What’s On Stage 28.01.2010

McKellen’s performance as Estragon is so cheesed-off in his grumbles, so poignant in his memory loss, so funny in his moments of childlike elation and so tender in his reconciliations with Vladimir, that for once I find myself unable to carp. There is a combination of skill, warmth and vulnerability in this performance that put me in mind of McKellen’s great fellow Lancastrian, Eric Morecambe. Roger Rees still fondly remembered for his Nicholas Nickleby with the RSC and absent from the British stage for far too long, brings a fine mixture of affection and exasperation to his dealings with Estragon, and captures the play’s sudden shafts of existential despair that are in short supply elsewhere. Matthew Kelly makes a superbly grotesque, mad-eyed Pozzo, while Ronald Pickup is both pitiable and hauntingly strange as his slave, Pozzo.

This is almost certainly the funniest and most compassionate production of the play you will ever see.
Daily Telegraph 28.01.2010

Will Sean Mathias’s recast production of Beckett’s play prove as successful as the one that astonished us by running for months at the same address last year? In many ways it deserves to do so. Ian McKellen and Roger Rees put me in mind of Morecambe and Wise as they might have become if old age, failure and poverty had brought them low. And why not, given Beckett’s assertion that the two men are as much vaudeville performers as tramps.

In his droll, wry way McKellen’s Estragon is funnier than last year, funnier even than his famous Widow Twankey. The glum Lancashire accent helps. And so does some immaculate timing. He now gets laughs where I’ve never heard them before: for instance, at his morose riposte to Vladimir’s claim that an encounter with Pozzo has passed the time, “it would have passed in any case”.

But is the production too funny? Well, I didn’t think so when Rees, mostly as spry and resilient as Vladimir should be, showed his manic side by slumping against a column or wailing in sudden dismay. Or when Kelly’s Pozzo, a baleful landowner from a Victorian melodrama, let rip with his arrogance, contempt and, finally, despair. Or when Pickup’s Lucky at last finds the awful clarity half-hidden in the seemingly chaotic monologue.

Or, indeed, when McKellen’s exhausted Estragon cries “on me, on me, pity on me” to an uncaring God or Godot. There’s an old, damaged heart inside those old, damaged clothes - and there are moments when it insists on hurting.
Times 28.01.2010

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