Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, pass the time while waiting for an unknown personage named Godot to appear. The play delves into themes of existence and of life's purpose, direction and absurdity.

Godot with Pratfalls

MIKE NICHOLS'S much heralded production of Waiting for Godot at New York's Lincoln Centre is based on a new text received from Samuel Beckett in August just in time for rehearsals. Until this new text is published, it is hard to say just how much Beckett is responsible for turning Godot into a tropical American comedy, with even a joke about the election.

Certainly comedian Robin Williams, the master improviser, broke the promise he made in rehearsals to play Estragon straight with no riffing. While the master of mime, Bill Irwin, was in the middle of Lucky's intellectual ramble, Williams apparently could restrain himself no longer and, in the manner of a stand up comic seeking audience participation, he ambled over to the front row and borrowed a woman's programme. He giggled wildly when he spotted his own name in it and then shared the joke with Vladimir, played by Steve Martin.

The audience's laughter seemed to inspire him to stray even further from the text. Seeing Bill Irwin still crazily orating, he cried at him "You're a liberal!" and the audience, recognising the allusion to Michael Dukakis, laughed even louder. The audience seemed to be all for the improvisations and additions to the text. At the interval an actor behind me praised Robin Williams for being "remarkably controlled" and he was serious.

Beckett's drama certainly lost its bleakness and sense of "nothingness" with Messrs Williams and Martin enlivening it with almost every classic comedy routine from Laurel and Hardy slapstick to a Charlie Chaplin game with a bowler hat. There was even a Robin Williams mocking impersonation of military macho. Whether any of it was spontaneous improvisation from their extensive repertoire or whether it was all carefully rehearsed one couldn't be sure, but Mike Nichols's original conception seemed to be to stress the comic side by Americanising the play with Martin and Williams in seedy clothes resembling two of New York's homeless waiting not for Godot but for free dinners.

Godot's symbols and double meaning faded into the background as this duet took over. There is nothing like broad comedy of the Williams and Martin kind to bring a dramatist down to earth. Beckett's pregnant pauses and dramatic use of silence that can seem so dull and draggy in more solemn productions was here a wonderful excuse for matchless mime worthy of the great silent comedies, but inevitably some of the meaning of Beckett's fable of Everyman was lost in the fun.

Turning Beckett's feast of agnostic irony into a series of revue sketches threatened to make Godot no more than a vehicle for Martin's and Williams' favourite routines. Steve Martin in a film recently turned Cyrano de Bergerac into a contemporary American with a long nose and he has now done much the same with Vladimir. As Mike Nichols did not stride on stage to demand what the hell Williams was doing, his improvisations presumably had the director's approval. But one wonders if there will be any negative reaction when news reaches the author in Paris.

--excerpted from Manchester Guardian Weekly, November 20, 1988, Pg. 27, W. J. Weatherby at the Lincoln Center

Stars Shine in Beckett

Waiting for Godot at the Lincoln Centre was bound to be the hottest ticket in New York this season. Performed in the small, 300-seat Mitzi E. Newhouse theatre by a cast of Hollywood stars, Mike Nichols' production is scheduled for only seven weeks to let its principals, Steve Martin and Robin Williams, go back to earning real money. Meanwhile, they bring the panache of their standup comic personas to Beckett's marvellously malleable text.

But does the nonchalance of their hip and cynical generation do justice to Beckett? The answer is yes, despite liberties the author would no doubt look askance at, since he is a notorious purist about productions of his plays. There is only one false note, at the end of Act one when Robin Williams as Estragon groans unnecessarily as the lights go down on their inability to move.

Yet throughout the production Williams does a complete pantomime with only slight reference to the text. When Vladimir hurriedly exits, Williams stares after him, laughingly lifting his leg and scratching the ground like a dog. He picks up a steer skull and addresses it like Hamlet or moves the jaws like a ventriloquist. To get Lucky to stop talking he shouts out "You're a liberal!" in a mocking reference to the presidential campaign.

After improvising most of the long monologues in his recent hit film, Good Morning, Vietnam, Williams could claim he is downright restrained. Steve Martin turns Vladimir into a robust, familiar, slightly bombastic character with complete fidelity to the lines. He assumes Vladimir has some affliction that forces him to grab his crotch at regular intervals, but the words are sacred.

The previous generation of American Beckett actors tended to look emaciated and sound foreign, turning the play into a dirge. Williams and Martin follow more in the tradition of the great comic Bert Lahr, the first American Estragon.

--excerpted from Financial Times (London), November 12, 1988, Saturday, SECTION I; The Arts; Pg. XXII, Frank Lipsius