Edinburgh Festival reviews: Waiting for Godot; Ulster American; Hamlet (an experience)

HAMLET (AN EXPERIENCE), Sweet Novotel, Until August 26

Samuel Beckett would, one suspects, have allowed himself a wry smile to see his play Waiting For Godot taking a prominent place in the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) some 63 years after its English-language premiere. The piece (which was broadly, but not universally, panned by the London critics in 1955) has become one of the most widely performed and warmly loved dramas in world theatre.

As this excellent production by Ireland’s Druid Theatre attests, Beckett’s classic has, over the years, lost none of its powerful, existentialist resonance or its bleakly comic humanism. We remain compelled and, somehow, comforted by this brief window into the interminable wait of the philosophical down-and-outs Vladimir and Estragon.

Director Garry Hynes brings us the play in all its paradoxical brilliance, as deep as a treatise by Kierkegaard and as light as an evening at the music hall. Designer Francis O’Connor has the visual measure of Beckett’s intent; his set is, at once, a wasteland of dried, cracked earth and a defiantly theatrical space, illuminated by a phosphorescent frame.

Beckett may have written the play 12 years into his Parisian exile, but he remained a profoundly Irish writer. To hear his words in the mouths of this superb Irish cast is to be reminded that the play is as Hibernian as it is universal.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the poignantly humane scene in which the loquacious vagrants contemplate, then decide against, a suicide pact (on the grounds that it might fail, leaving the other bereft and alone). Marty Rea (Vladimir) and Aaron Monaghan (Estragon) achieve a beautifully balanced, intelligently comic double act in which character contrasts are woven into an emotive co-dependency.

Rory Nolan is, by turns, titanically pompous and appallingly helpless as the tyrannical Pozzo. Garrett Lombard delivers the enslaved Lucky’s great, torrential monologue with tremendous rhythm, meaning and pathos.

For the Godot aficionado, Hynes offers the play as if it were a newly restored painting, with reinvigorated colours and textures. To the newcomer, she brings a vibrant, clever and enthralling rendering of a totemic classic.

Belfast playwright David Ireland (whose theatre career began as an actor on Scottish stages) has created a comedy altogether more ferocious than Beckett’s. In Ulster American, proudly Irish-American Hollywood star actor Jay Conway (a wonderfully monstrous performance by Darrell D’Silva) arrives in London to begin rehearsals for the premiere of a play that he mistakenly, and idiotically, takes to be a work of angry Irish Republicanism.

The ensuing drama is a fabulously brutal satire of the cinema and theatre industries, and, most pointedly, of their apparent championing of resurgent identity politics. Imagine a collaboration between a Northern Irish Dario Fo and Quentin Tarantino.

It would be criminal to divulge the contents of Conway’s initial conversation with painfully liberal English theatre director Leigh Carver (Robert Jack on delightfully excruciating form). Suffice it to say it is as hilarious as it is discomfiting.

The arrival of playwright Ruth Davenport (a memorably high-octane Lucianne McEvoy) overturns the political presumptions of both Conway and Carver, unleashing a farce which as rapid in its descent as it vicious in its humour. Director Gareth Nicholls’s Traverse Theatre Company production is perfectly attuned to the play’s outrageous parody and its breakneck momentum. Likewise designer Becky Minto’s fine London apartment set, which bends to the piece’s considerable physical demands.

From new drama to a new take on, arguably, Shakespeare’s greatest play. The creative duo of actor Emily Carding and director Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir impressed mightily with their fine adaptation of Richard III (an excellent one-woman rendering of the Bard’s bastard king). They have now turned their attention to an even greater challenge with Hamlet (An Experience).

In Richard III, Carding addresses members of the audience as if they are characters in the play. It is a minimal form of audience participation which enables Carding to play to two great strengths; namely, her tremendous proficiency with Shakespeare’s language and her compelling skill in intimate performance.

With this Hamlet, Carding and Sigfusdottir seem to have decided that the chief quality of the Richard show is its involvement of the audience. That aspect is extended here.

At the outset Carding assigns characters from the play to her necessarily small audience (I, for example, was the ill-fated spymaster Polonious). This is, no doubt, great fun for those who fancy a bit of off-the-cuff acting as part of their Fringe experience.

However, what the piece gains in participatory amusement it loses in the intensity of Carding’s performance. Her Hamlet shares a wit and dexterity with her Richard, but one can’t help but wish to experience it without self-imposed interruptions.

Elsewhere, the National Theatre of Scotland’s expanded, five-actor production of David Greig and Gordon McIntyre’s play with songs Midsummer (The Hub, until August 26) captures the charm of the off-piste Edinburgh romcom. However, the shift to a larger play detracts from what is a lovely, two-handed studio drama.

Polish company Teatr Biuro Podrozy’s outdoor spectacular Silence (Pleasance at EICC, until August 26), delivers some memorable images in its humane contemplation of the global migration crisis. However, there is something a little too direct and repetitive in its visual metaphors.

Finally, the EIF/Royal Lyceum’s workshop presentation of sections of Sir David Lindsay’s 16th-century Scottish classic Ane Satyre Of The Thrie Estaitis (run ended) provided fascinating insights into an enduringly significant drama. Let’s hope that it grows into a full, big stage production.