The critics sound as they were rather expecting a maverick reading from director Deborah Warner and actor Fiona Shaw, tackling the near-monologue from the defiantly sunny Winnie, gradually getting buried up to her neck in sand.
The last time the pair collaborated on his work, with an experimental production of Footfalls, it was closed by the Beckett estate for interfering with the author's intentions. "It looked as though Warner would never be allowed to direct Beckett again," says Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, "but she has been granted a second chance and repays the trust shown in her with a knockout production".
For Paul Taylor in the Independent, however, the play is "characteristically radical in spirit" and manages to give Beckett's very exact dialogue and staging instructions a contemporary spin even as it "obeys the letter of the law". As well as "the existential predicament" of its lonely heroine, Warner manages to "put you in mind of both Iraq and global warming".
Charles Spencer in the Telegraph suggests that this has much to do with Tom Pye's "extraordinary epic design". "It looks," he says, "like the aftermath of some catastrophic war, or a world on the brink of extinction through climate change."
But the focus of the reviews is - appropriately, since nearly all the play's lines are hers - on Fiona Shaw's reading of a woman who, as Benedict Nightingale observes, "keeps talking, talking to be sure she is alive" - a symbol, he says, "for every woman who has squandered her life enduring the daily tedium, trying to enjoy the domestic trivia, failing to communicate with a maddeningly taciturn husband".
(Tim Potter, who plays husband Willie, grunting and flipping through porn, may feel somewhat hard done by, since his performance as the albeit largely silent second part of the two-hander gets barely any scrutiny.)
Spencer lavishes praise on "a tour de force of wondrous invention and energy" as Shaw "speaking in a lovely lilting Irish brogue that suits Beckett perfectly". This directly contradicts our own Michael Billington, who felt that Shaw's "brilliant naturalistic performance" overlooked the musicality of Beckett's "resonant masterpiece".
Taylor, too, sounds a cautiously critical note. Although he admires a "busy, witty portrayal", he also thinks Winnie's soliloquies are "too archly aware of the audience and that this diminishes our sense of her terrible loneliness".
No such ambivalence for Spencer, who hymns a "superbly in-form Fiona Shaw, who delivers the dramatist's potent stage poetry to perfection".
