A double-act to treasure

The reason for the latter probably has something to do with the fact that Brian Cox and Bill Paterson have just come out of a strip lit rehearsal room where they've spent all day rehearsing outgoing Royal Lyceum artistic director Mark Thomson's forthcoming production of Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett's classic piece of existential vaudeville - though the latter word is one they'll dispute – which opens the theatre's fiftieth anniversary season this week.

Cox was here back in 1965 when the Royal Lyceum company was founded and has been back intermittently since becoming a Hollywood star. Paterson too has continued his stage work while becoming an equally familiar face in film and television.

In Waiting for Godot, Cox and Paterson play Vladimir and Estragon, two gentlemen of the road waiting for the elusive saviour that gives the play its title even as they seem to be occupying an almost barren landscape at the end of the world. With only visitors Pozzo and Lucky, played here by John Bett and Benny Young, to distract them, Vladimir and Estragon have a world of possibilities ahead of them.

“We're not making it like a double act or any of that kind of thing,” Cox says. “We're just concentrating on the relationships and letting them speak for themselves. We're not trying to impose any kind of comic business on it. There are comic moments there, of course, but we're just playing straight. Apart from their own neuroses, of course.”

Paterson picks up on this.

“They're very different men,” he says. “There's the optimist and the pessimist, where you have the one who sees life as possible with options and who's eager to move on, and then you have the other who just says we might as well stay here and see what they can get. That's the difference that comes out if you don't add anything else and don't impose a big concept on it.”

Concepts have become anathema to Beckett's work ever since En Attendant Godot appeared in its original French version in Paris in 1953 prior to Peter Hall's English language production two years later.

“The play seems to have its own volition,” Cox observes. “It goes where it wants to go. That's its brilliance, but it's hard, because Beckett makes certain demands, and you've just got to acknowledge them. You can't fight them, and you can’t change them, because he's made it clear that's what he wants, and you have to understand that.”

Paterson points out that “We get absolute freedom apart from the one freedom we've taken a bit for granted for years, in that we can't change a word because we might not like it. What Beckett does, he gives you a certain amount of, not latitude, but largesse. There's a largesse in the play that he allows you to have your way, then he squeezes you technically and forces you back on track. He's very unremitting in that way.”

Paterson nails it when points out that “it's a blueprint for a very particularly kind of mechanism. You could do endless little routines, but you don't want to do that. Some of it might fall naturally and might work, but as soon as you start doing it as a couple of old codgers doing a vaudeville act who've fallen on hard times, I don't think you need that.”

Surprisingly, despite the best part of a century's acting experience between them, neither Cox, aged sixty-nine, or Paterson, seventy, have performed Beckett until now.

“So would you go and see people do a play like this who've never done something like this before?” Paterson self-mocks.

While they've not worked much together over the last four decades, the fact that Cox and Paterson, and indeed Bett and Young, know each other well should enable a certain shorthand.

“I think it helps both with us and with Benny and with John,” according to Cox. “The fact that we're all of an age, we all have the same...

“We all have the same anecdotes,” Paterson interrupts.

Cox chuckles.

“And we all have the same state of exhaustion,” he says.

As Cox observes, Beckett's insular meditations on mortality aren't a young man's game.

"We're actually the right age to play these parts,” he says. “A lot of the time the people who play them tend to be too young.”

In veteran critic Michael Billington's recently published volume, 101 Greatest Plays, Waiting for Godot was noticeably absent, with Billington opting for All That Fall to represent Beckett. Such a seemingly controversial choice has left its mark on Beckett scholars and actors alike, with Billington defending his choice on the grounds that today Godot had been rendered as little more than a boulevard comedy with no social relevance and with little room for reinterpretation.

This was questioned by actress and Beckett champion Lisa Dwan, who pointed out resonances which Cox and Paterson appear to have picked up on.

“It's a valid point of view that Billington has,” says a diplomatic Paterson.. “You could say that the absurd humour it had in the 1950s along with all the other absurdists like Ionesco and Pirandello and all these guys, they've been absorbed into the mainstream now. Waiting for Godot was going out at the same time as The Goon Show, where you had other strange men in strange environments saying ludicrous non sequiturs to each other.

“Then Monty Python picked up the flame ten years later, so surrealism and non sequitur comedy is now part of the mainstream, and you can't stop that from happening. But if you go back and look at it and give it a clear production, it should have a shining light of freshness about it that shows why it was profound at the time and has survived the test of history.”

Cox expands on this, bringing Beckett's play bang up to date as he he points out how “We've got in our present history people crossing desolate landscapes and who have no place to be. We're living in the middle of it, which is what Lisa Dwan picked up on so brilliantly. These realities are still with us, the realities of disenfranchisement and disconnection and being constantly on the move, that's all talked about in the play. There's this sense of desolation, and they talk about thousands of corpses.

“So there's lots resonances, but he never dwells on them. He just allows them a moment and moves on. And it's quite wonderful, that aspect of Beckett, because he allows the comic and the poetic to really exist side by side with a kind of effortlessness. But you have to get it right. You have to get the tone right. That's the hard part, but you don't need to reinterpret this play. You just need to get it right.”

Waiting For Godot, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, September 18-October 10.

www.lyceum.org.uk

ends