Theatres are reconsidering the dramas that smashed into the apparent decorum of the 1950s and presented audiences with raw fury and despair. Next week, I’ll be reviewing new productions of Arnold Wesker’s Roots (1959) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). Meanwhile, the ingenious James Macdonald directs a terrific cast – pivoting around Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw – in Samuel Beckett’s most celebrated, seismically disrupting play. It is the play of Beckett’s that I like least.
Waiting for Godot, first staged in English in 1955, has created indelible images of despair and uprootedness, of instinctive belief and loss of faith, of isolation, cruelty and discontinuity. Two men under a bare tree; an overseer who says he will come and never does; unexplained brutality and subjugation, with one man led like a dog on a rope, another suddenly struck blind. The play reworked the line between anguish and hilarity; it brought postwar politics into focus; it threw a new light on old plays – not least underlining the crazed disjointedness of King Lear.
The importance is indisputable; the riffs marvellous – especially the moment in which the word “critic” is flung as the ultimate insult. Yet I find it less powerful than Endgame, Happy Days or Krapp’s Last Tape: its assaults are more obvious; the disillusion and the much-vaunted music hall jauntiness of the two tramps are often insufficiently fused. Notorious for being obscure, Godot can also be prolix.
Still, anyone interested in the theatre will want to see Macdonald’s intricate, thoughtful staging. Whishaw is finely doleful and musing, in uneasy repose like a dancer who has alighted from a leap; the grittier Msamati has a beautiful sardonic grace, spoofing his words with a wave of the hand. Tom Edden’s Lucky is an excellent jangled marionette, mesmerising in his jabbering eloquence; Jonathan Slinger is precise and sinister as a spivvy Pozzo. Rae Smith’s costume and set designs reveal subtly. She reimagines the characters’ crucial hats, swapping Pozzo’s trad bowler for a feathered Tirolean number, and creates a hollow rocky landscape, perched on a black void. Bruno Poet’s lighting sucks the colour out as hope drains.
Space-gobbling and smouldering, Lyndsey Turner’s production of Coriolanus strides across the stage as a war monster. Es Devlin’s massive design, with all-over videos by Ash J Woodward, reflects the essence of Shakespeare’s most elusive hero: a warrior as impressive as he is opaque.
It is not surprising that directors seldom tackle the play: I have seen it only a handful of times in 25 years, most memorably with a flayed Tom Hiddleston at the Donmar and clangingly in an aircraft hangar in south Wales. Coriolanus is impermeable, self-armoured. His ambiguity – is it principled incorruptibility or arrogance that makes him unwilling to court popularity with Roman citizens? – does not automatically compel. Short on soliloquies, he keeps the audience at bay: his sudden decisions and swerves of allegiance seem visited on him by the gods or his mother (played with adamantine assurance by Pamela Nomvete). David Oyelowo is forceful but uninflected; as unvarying as a bullet.
Turner’s production is monumental rather than fully articulated or driving. Only Peter Forbes’s outstanding Menenius – who marvellously describes himself as more at ease with “the buttock of the night than the forehead of the morning” – really uses the suppleness of the verse. The play’s pressing concerns – the rise of populism, the hunger for confrontation that spreads like a pandemic through citizens, tribunes and leaders – are expressed not through speech but in implacable imagery. In brilliant pre-opening moments, the stage is dominated by an abstract monochrome video that breaks up – rather as did the Channel 4 logo – before refocusing to reveal a crowd scene; at the end, Coriolanus’s body is seen from above, as if by a god, being carried through the city. Huge pillars rise and fall throughout to create unyielding domestic interiors, public arenas, battlefields. The set pieces are tremendous but they lack an internal central motor.
Populism gets a musical hammering in A Face in the Crowd, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s last production after a vivid six years as artistic director of the Young Vic. The show is bright with promise. Adapted by Sarah Ruhl from Elia Kazan’s 1957 movie, it features a petty criminal whose gift of the gab makes him the star of a radio show and a poisonous nationwide political influence. Elvis Costello has written music and lyrics – jazzy, croony, with trumpet and sax as well as a welcome country twang, not heard often enough on stage. Anna Fleischle’s design conjures a radio station and toy theatre-style landscapes behind a pocket proscenium arch. Ramin Karimloo, once the Phantom in the Opera, and Anoushka Lucas – revelatory in Oklahoma! – star.
It founders. The charm of Costello’s score fades without providing a knockout number or driving on the action. Karimloo and Lucas are pallid versions of their best selves. The choreography is cramped. The Donald Trump parallels are remorselessly pounded home, with an excruciating episode of audience participation: flags are dispensed as you take your seat.
There are glimmers of a stronger, more sidelong show. A close-harmony trio shimmy in breezy ads: a merry Pepsodent jingle involves waving a giant cardboard molar and toothpaste tube. They provide the show’s most telling moments. Used like a Greek chorus, stringing the story on a thread of advertising fabrication, they could deliver a sweetly acid satire. Think: the Andrews Liver Salts Sisters.
Star ratings (out of five)
Waiting for Godot ★★★★
Coriolanus ★★★
A Face in the Crowd ★★
• Waiting for Godot is at Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 14 December
• Coriolanus is at the Olivier, National Theatre, London, until 9 November
• A Face in the Crowd is at the Young Vic, London, until 9 November
