‘Waiting for Godot’ feels new once again at the Stratford Festival, with a superb Paul Gross at its centre

Samuel Beckett is one of these writers — dead for 36 years, yet with a notoriously litigious estate that has maintained his aggressive style of micromanagement. 

That’s why every staging of “Waiting for Godot” looks more or less like a carbon copy of any other. “A country road. A tree” is all that Beckett calls for in his stage directions at the top of his play, so some form of a country road and a tree is what we always get. 

So exacting and precise are his stage directions — he dictates what an actor should be doing in any given moment, where they should take a pause, even the very tone of their delivery — that Beckett might as well have directed where his performers can and cannot breathe. 

Creative rebellion, therefore, is a challenge. And when it arrives, it manifests in subtle ways. In the most recent Broadway revival of “Godot,” British auteur Jamie Lloyd found a sneaky loophole in Beckett’s stage directions, which never specify how the tree and country road should be depicted in relation to each other, or in relation to the performers. What if the tree was the country road, and tramps Vladimir and Estragon were stuck inside it? asked Lloyd, in an appropriately absurdist directorial twist. 

At the Stratford Festival, Molly Atkinson’s mostly marvellous, occasionally overdirected, new revival is quietly rebellious in another way: through its staging.

This marks Stratford’s fifth production of Beckett’s classic. Its inaugural run in 1968 was at the Avon Theatre. Three subsequent revivals (in 1984, 1996 and 2013) were all mounted at the Tom Patterson Theatre. But this is the first to be presented at the 1,800-seat Festival Theatre. And if there’s ever a case to be made about how a theatre’s space and design can inform a play, Atkinson’s revival should serve as Exhibit A. 

The masterstroke here lies in how Atkinson makes use of the Festival Theatre’s thrust stage. Without changing a word in Beckett’s script, she makes the 1953 play feel new once again, pulsing with vitality.

I’ve seen “Godot” twice before, with both productions running in traditional proscenium venues, seating no more than 400 patrons. In this kind of setting, the play’s country road is usually depicted as running from one side of the stage to the other, separating an audience from Vladimir and Estragon. 

By using a wide thrust stage like the Festival’s, Atkinson quietly alters her audience’s relationship with Beckett’s characters. In this revival, the country road in Cory Sincennes’ set bisects the auditorium, cutting across the stage from the downstage left vomitorium to the upstage right exit. It creates an environment in which we’re not so much watching Vladimir and Estragon from a distance, but waiting alongside them, implicated in their struggle. 

Never, to my eye, has the Festival stage looked so barren. Gone is its iconic balcony. The set off steps leading to its upstage entrances have been replaced with wooden ramps. Beckett’s dialogue lingers in the air longer than it would in any other space. 

Atkinson sometimes attempts to do too much to fill the larger venue. In the first act, she pushes the physical comedy too far in a sequence in which Estragon tries, in vain, to put on his boots — threatening to turn the moment into Laurel and Hardy-style double act. Elsewhere, the rhythmic patter of Beckett’s dialogue occasionally gets lost. 

But more often than not, Atkinson draws fine performances out of her cast. Tom McCamus, stepping into the role of Estragon after playing Vladimir in 1996, lends immense pathos to the role of the befuddled tramp, his voice producing sonorities like the languid wails of a sad trombone. He’s complemented by Paul Gross — doing some of his finest stage work I’ve seen from him in recent years — as Vladimir, who speaks with a brighter, lighter tone. 

It’s often said that “Godot” is a play in which nothing happens. But it’s a show in which everything happens, too. While at the end of each act, Vladimir and Estragon end up back where they began, holding out hope for the arrival of Godot, who never does arrive, there’s so much that happens in between. They quarrel, they argue, they joke, they laugh. They run around, they swap hats, they pull off their boots and put them back on. 

Their waiting is also punctuated by the occasional visitor. Pozzo (Jonathan Goad, in an impressively dominating performance and dressed in blood-red garments by Sincennes) represents the worst of humanity, a slave master who keeps his human chattel, ironically named Lucky (David W. Keeley, skulking around the stage), with a noose around his neck. The tramps are also visited by a young boy (an excellent Gordon Paul Miller at the performance I attended, alternating with Asher Albert Waxman), who twice tells the pair, ominously, that Godot won’t come this evening, “but surely tomorrow.”

In the years after it debuted, “Godot” was often described as a Cold War play, holding a mirror up to the pervasive mood of that era. Beckett’s play is no longer that, of course. But I’m continually struck by how it still fits like a glove in our contemporary society. 

Yes, it’s a work about life’s futility. Yet it offers a surprisingly hopeful message, too, arguing that what matters is not the bookends of our lives, but what happens in between those bookends. 

What comes through most in this production, in fact, is that we’re in this life — futile as it may seem — together. In other productions, when Vladimir and Estragon embrace, it often comes across as insincere, like two clowns engaging in a big, over-the-top hug. But that’s never the case here. When these two come together, when even one raises his hand to touch the other’s cheek, there’s profound sincerity to this action. 

Atkinson’s production is filled with other small, unique touches. Alessandro Juliani’s upbeat, techno compositions, arriving at the beginning and end of each act, serve as connectors between our contemporary world and Beckett’s absurdist one. And in one scene, Atkinson has McCamus and Gross both run off the stage, in opposing directions, only for them to return from the opposite entrances — as if they were stuck in a loopy purgatory in which any path leading out only deposits them back at square one.

I vehemently disagree with the views of the Beckett estate. (This is an estate that has famously barred women actors from performing in “Godot,” forcing them to wait until the work’s copyright expires in 2059 to step into the show.) 

Live theatre, as I’ve persistently argued, is an ever-evolving art form. Like in a relay, a playwright is only one part of this process. If one wants to retain complete control over their property, they should write a book or practice painting instead.

Stubborn as Beckett and his estate have been, however, it’s productions like Atkinson’s that help to pry the door open, with small, barely imperceptible perversions that, bit by bit, help us see a classic work anew. These changes come slow. They’re always incremental. But in productions like this one, they’re well worth the wait.