Waiting for Godot, a play for our times, now running at The Street

“Let us do something, while we have the chance … at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”

That might seem an appropriate sentiment for what just went down in the United States of America, but it’s actually a quote from Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot.

It’s probably more than appropriate timing then that Canberra’s Street Theatre has launched a season of the play that delves into the human psyche and condition.

The West End is currently running a season of the play, and it will open on Broadway next year – maybe they all know something about how applicable it is to current affairs.

Waiting for Godot asks us to rethink the world and our place in it.

Vladimir and Estragon wait on a road by a tree for a man named Godot.

They don’t know who he is, why they are meeting, or what time he is coming – only that something amazing could happen when he does.

It all sounds way too familiar and enormously now.

Witty and tragic, hilarious and haunting, the play resonates today as much as it did 70 years ago, revealing the fundamental experience of what it means to be alive.

With our desperate desire to find purpose against the uncertainty of existence, the human condition may be as much about waiting as achievement.

Director Caroline Stacey says the play’s central figures are equally witnesses and victims, waiting for a salvation that never quite appears, but they continue to survive, to endure and to strive as day follows endless day and there’s “nothing to be done”.

But there is hope in surviving, and the play is an affirming act of hope.

“Waiting for Godot is a remarkable, astonishing work that presents to an audience exactly what it feels like to be alive,” she says.

“The inner experience of our daily lives is told very specifically, moment by moment, and it is very, very funny and occasionally bleak, and it goes to the truth of being alive.

“It is a play that is timeless and a classic work that always feels fresh and new and surprising. It changed the rules of theatre and performance, and for that alone, it is worth discovering or rediscovering.

“We discover in Waiting for Godot that there is no escape from the compulsion to think – to try to solve unsolvable mysteries.”

Ms Stacey says she has wanted to bring the Godot experience to Canberra audiences for a long time.

“Right now, post-pandemic, in our world of wicked problems, how we get up every morning, how we get through each day never knowing whether our hopes and dreams might be granted, offers an affirming act of hope as well as absolute delight in working with terrific actors inhabiting Beckett’s words,” she says.

PJ Williams stars as Estragon and says it is a privilege to be performing in one of the most iconic plays in the modern canon.

“It is a work of great depth and humour that takes the audience on a journey to the here and now,” he says.

“Beckett’s ability to convey the fragility and resilience of his characters with such precision is both a gift and a challenge as an actor.”

Christopher Samuel Carroll takes on the role of Vladimir and says, contrary to what we might expect, the play presents waiting as something very active.

“It uses distraction, companionship and petty troubles to keep anguish at arm’s length as a means of survival,” he says.

“While we ease our impotence and overwhelm with habit, this waiting is ruptured by the sudden, blistering sensation that the real stuff of life is slipping away from us.

“I myself struggle with falling into the mindset of if I can just get through today (or this week, or to the end of this year) then, then I’ll be able to catch my breath, figure it all out and really start living.

“Beckett, with a deep well of compassion and a brutal absence of sentimentality, confronts us with the hard truth that time waits for no man.”

Waiting for Godot season at The Street runs from Saturday, 9 November, until Sunday, 24 November. Tickets can be booked through The Streets’ website.