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.
