Waiting for Godot - Theatre Royal Haymarket

I don't think it's elitist to not offer day seats - if this is selling well enough, why should they?

900 seats, 8 performances a week for 3 months, with prices starting at £15 is elitist?

Fwiw, I make it just under 100,000 seats in all.

Someone might want to punt that DP is elitist but I don't think that works, either ..

Oh wow, I was definitely expecting there to be some kind of rush - last I heard it wasn't selling all that well so things must have picked up. There was a pay-what-you-can performance advertised for Thursday but I was too late seeing it.

I have a £15 ticket but I do find it constantly sad that cheap seats that aren't rush are always in the Gods. I like to see people's faces.

Does anyone know if under 30s tickets include 30 year olds?

They do!

I’d had my eye on this production, with my blue light card, but was put off as my partner doesn’t have one. I’d missed it saying 2 tickets per valid ID - and just noticed they’ve released a whole lot of stalls row B tickets across much of the run. Managed to get a pair on a Saturday for row B centre. The tickets are clearly printed with Under 30/Blue Light Card - 2 tickets per valid ID. Hope this helps someone!

(Edit: looking at seating plans, they may have only just opened up row B for sale, possibly as the staging has been finalised, as C was previously the furthest forward on sale.)

I just attended the first preview. I thought it was very, very good. I love the play but the quartet of actors is wonderful. It could have gone for another hour.
It started at 7:36 and it ended at 10:10. Longish intermission.

Personally I'm going to go with fairly average here. To me, Ben Whishaw largely played Ben Whishaw which detracted. He and Lucian Msamati caught the more playful and physical aspects of the text well, but the character of Vladimir just felt off to me. Fortunately I was in a cheap seat. If you've never seen it before then it's probably fine - if you have then it adds nothing new.

How high is the stage for this? I’ve got a cheap front row ticket for Friday with a restricted view warning.

It's absolutely fine, you have to look up a bit and you miss them when they're laying on the floor (only one scene that I remember of) but I'd say it's pretty great.

Saw this tonight, and thought it was great.

It's nowhere near as funny as the 2009 version at this theatre, but I recall Michael Billington (unlike me, I loved the comedy of it lol) being annoyed by all the laughs in that one, and wanting a more poetic bleak version.

This is that more poetic bleak version, in my opinion.

Some spoilers follow. . .

This play is about two characters in a bleak landscape, passing the time, waiting for Godot (whose name sounds like "God,") who may or may not be a no show.

In 2009, Ian McKellen's manic impish physical comedy was off the wall funny as he played Estragon like some kind of base Shakespearian fool to Patrick Stewart's benign thoughtful Kingly Vladimir.

Here, Lucian Msamati's Estragon is still base and physical and Ben Whishaw's Vladimir is still benign and thoughtful, but now it is Whishaw's Vladimir who feels like the (wise and wispy) fool to Msamati's (dominant, desperate and dimwitted) Kingly Estragon. Whishaw is ever affectionately at Msamati's side, submissively stroking his depressed flailing pal into speech and action.

The pair are immensely endearing in their interactions, in the push and pull of keeping each other going, but are not particularly funny.

This is a conscious choice on the part of the director, who is evidently aiming for poetic and bleak. Msamati is a supremely capable physical comedian, and gave one of my favourite comedy performances in "The Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes" at the Tricycle Theatre, so the choice of having him be ever on the verge of being defeated by time (where McKellen felt ever on the verge of defeating time) is deliberate.

The comedy in this piece is instead provided by the other pairing of Jonathan Slinger and Tom Edden, who are very funny indeed when they do show up in their master/slave type relationship. Slinger's Pozzo is less the puffed up Lord that Simon Callow made of him, more a narcissistic business-like wannabe impresario, and Slinger milks laugh after laugh from the character's eagerness for and delight in attaining any form of attention.

Tom Edden, the remarkable physical comedian who got the most laughs out of his doddering old man in "One Man Two Guvnors" here is again utterly remarkable as the seemingly contented slavish Lucky, whose frozen bug-eyed drooling visage (he doesn't seem to even bother to swallow his spit because his master hasn't told him to lol) is so compelling you can't look away.

I think the strategy of having the main characters played as essentially bamboozled and sad, but besieged by comic situations, works well as a metaphor for life.

This is a show the BBC would be happy to show at Christmas, because, like the Christmas EastEnders episode, it doesn't depict other people's lives as hunky dory and it offers people living lives of lonely desperation a kinship in the suffering of the main characters.

This show is like a sad "Groundhog Day," in that only one character, Ben Whishaw's Vladimir, is completely conscious of just how repetitive life is from moment to moment, and day to day, and this realisation escalates his loneliness.

Ben Whishaw's pivotal take on this lonely knowing man, this affectionate fool to his only friend, I found deeply moving.

Yes, this version is flatter than the more zany 2009 Haymarket version, and flatter also than the Australian Hugo Weaving version that played more recently at the Barbican, but then, life can be pretty flat for all of us at times, especially if we think too much about it, and this version is willing to hold our hand in the poetic bleak times. 4 and a half stars from me.

PS: The running time was 2 and three quarter hours, including one interval.