Waiting for Godot

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

So I saw “Waiting for Godot” last night with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. Oh, and Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup) as well. Kathleen has stage managed three productions of it and so this play meant a lot to her.

It was the first time I’d seen it. Here’s my spoiler free review:

WTF?

Seriously. What the hëll was THAT about?

I am happy to award a brand spanking new Peter David WTF award to the best explanation.

PAD

33 comments on “Waiting for Godot”

      2. If Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart hosted a news show together, I would watch it every night.

  2. I have no idea what “Waiting for Godot” is about, but I’m reading the above ‘review’ in the voice of Arthur Dent because I can. 🙂

  3. What was that about?

    Oh, that was about two and a half hours, plus intermission.

    [ba-DUM-dum]

  4. I would probably pay $135 dollars to watch Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart read from the phone book for a couple of hours.

  5. I was invited by a contact from MTV to photograph the September 24 press junket for the production.

    I wrote about the experience here:
    https://www.facebook.com/notes/luigi-novi/shooting-patrick-stewart-and-ian-mckellen/10153334925040347

    It includes links to my photos.

    Too bad I didn’t get to see it. I had always wanted to see Patrick Stewart in his one-man A Christmas Carol, but can’t afford tickets to stuff like that. But at least I got to speak to him and McKellan briefly.

  6. Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto, living in an Alzheimer’s hospice care facility, stripped of their memory and thus their powers, think they are two British stage and screen actors and sit around talking about life and yet still bore people to death…THIS WEEK ON…WAITING FOR GODOT!

  7. Patrick Stewart popped up on stage during New York Comic Con to plug the two shows and let everybody know that there were going to be some incredibly cheap two-for-one tickets available as a thank you to the fans. I’m sorry I didn’t follow up on it at the time.

  8. I’ve always (well, “always” being since I once had to figure it out for a grade) had two thoughts on it.

    (1) It almost came across as a long-form treatment of the idea that so many waste a great deal of life philosophizing and examining without actually doing. The two characters essentially just sit, talk, sleep, talk, muck about, talk, etc. They don’t really “do” anything else. And the whole time that they’re wasting all of this time, they’re waiting on Godot, seemingly that outside spark needed to actually do something, and Godot never arrives. They don’t ultimately do anything because they don’t take it upon themselves to do anything and would rather wait for someone else to give them the impetus to do something.

    Now, I could be way off the mark here. My last reading of Waiting for Godot was in my last year of high school. The reason that it’s been (Oh my lord has it really been that long?) over 20 years is because of my second thought on the thing.

    (2) Waiting for Godot is a mind-numbingly boring way to kill a few hours. I would almost rather watch Manos: The Hands of Fate 20 times in a row than read that play again. Maybe being able to watch two great actors elevate the play would make me change my mind on it, but having had to read Waiting for Godot several times in a two week period, it pretty much killed my desire to find out if that’s true or not.

    And judging from your “spoiler free review” above, I think I may have been right to take a pass on it over the years.

    1. I haven’t seen it or read it. But it might be interesting — in an artsy and equally boring sort of way — to adapt it somehow to the internet age.

  9. I remember seeing a scene from Godot in high school and being incredibly bored – I can’t imagine sitting through the entire thing, even with Stewart and McKellan.

  11. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing it, but I’ve read it several times. For a short description, it’s about two people trying to find meaning — or pass the time — with each other, with the strangers who pass through, and with the eternal unfulfilled promise of someone named Godot who may come and save them — or who may not exist. It’s also about the need to do something and the inertia of an unchanging existence.

    That help?

    1. I think you’re take and mine are fairly close. Did you find it massively boring as well?

      1. I find it quite beautifully done — and I’m not alone. A college teacher told us the story that when the play first opened on Broadway, lots of people found it confusing, boring, and garbage. During its run, it was shown at a prison — and while the prisoners were generally less educated (and certainly on Broadway less), they almost all loved it, as they could relate to being trapped in the same place and trying to pass the time while not sure if there would ever be an escape.

  12. Well, you know, Waiting for Godot made massive waves when it came out and started a revolution. It was, for the first time, a play about nothing (like Seinfeld), or so it seems. It was a play about the uselessness of everything and the sheer life experience of doing stuff and striving for stuff, where it’s all actually for nothing.

    In and of itself that changed the art of theater, which changed cinema and literature. Suddenly we could talk about more things, small things, the uselessness of things – rather than just big things.

    Now – maybe it wasn’t in the production you saw – but Waiting for Godot is a comedy (also like Seinfeld). It’s written like a Laurel and Hardy comedy. And if the director knows what s/he’s doing, the audience laughs and laughs and laughs. It’s real easy not to direct it as a comedy, though. One of my theater teacher, one of the great directors of her country, was the first to direct the play in the country. She claims that after one of the shows, the audience was so excited they rushed the stage, lifted the actors on the shoulders, and ran with them around the building.

    Today, a play about nothing is nothing.

  13. I had an awesome AP English teacher in high school who, among other things, had us read this play.

  15. Peter,

    Congratulations on now having been the butt of the longest running ‘in’ joke in theater history! You paid big bucks so that the theater literati could watch another house of ‘suckers’ sit and watch a couple of hours of a Seinfeld episode, but without the humor! Kathleen probably sat there, barely able to cover her guffaws at bringing her family into the joke!
    😉

    (please note the ‘wink’ indicating that this is tongue in cheek, and not a serious post or accusation of massive conspiracies in the theater world…)

    Charlie

    1. Charlie,
      Ya know I am gonna have to kill you now. * grin *
      Kathleen O’Shea
      Member of AEA

  17. Fer Crissake guys! Leave a note and go get a beer and a burger or sump’n! You can drop back by later after catching a flick or doing your laundry!

    You KNOW that Godot is never on time, now don’t you?

  18. I’ve heard it likened to the Christian experience of trying to stay faithful while waiting for the 2nd coming of Christ (whom, to date, millions of people are still waiting on).

    That being said, it could probably be more universally applied any situation where the “faithful” are stuck trying to find meaning in their lives/actions while waiting for a seemingly ever-absent savior figure to come and provide the “ultimate meaning”.

    That being said, it dind’t make for a particular compelling read when I tackled it in my 20’s. Though I’d like to think that Stewart/McKellan could make anything interesting.

    If not Stewart/McKellen, what other pair could take a shot at making it interesting? Clint Eastwood/Morgan Freeman? Tommy Lee Jones/Will Smith?

    Who else has any suggestions?

    1. Robin Williams and Steve Martin actually performed this together back in the late 80’s! That’s another duo I wish that I had seen perform this play.

  19. dun dun dun dun dun dun da dun

    The godot! The godot!

    dun dun dun dun dun dun da dun…

    So, which was Leader-1 and which was Cy-Kill?

  20. I read the book not too long ago and HATED it. So frakkin’ boring. That being said, I STILL might go see it for Stewart & McKellan (though definitely not for $135). In the meantime, I’m seeing them do “No Man’s Land” first for considerably less.

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