Waiting for Waiting for Godot, The St James Theatre, SW1

reviewed for The Times, 2 September 2016

As you might have guessed, we’re in for a parody of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Yet Dave Hanson’s light play is more reminiscent of another theatrical touchstone: the farcical Pyramus and Thisbe sketch that closes A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s not just the larger-than-life performances that recall Bottom’s famous moment in the sun. At just over an hour’s playing time (plus an unnecessary drinks interval), it will teach you the meaning of the Shakespearean phrase “tediously brief”.

The set-up is simple. During a professional performance of Waiting for Godot, two actors sit backstage. Understudies. Foot soldiers of the hard theatrical grind. As in the original, our two heroes are hopeless cases, blindly waiting for a strange figure (the Director) to arrive and give their lives meaning. They wait, and wait, and wait some more.

In the hands of Beckett, of course, this would be the starting point for a complex metaphor for existentialism (and so forth). Here it’s just a waste of time. Some of the jokes about theatrical superstitions were tired by the time they were done to death by Blackadder. The toilet gags aren’t much better.

The director, Mark Bell, is the man behind big commercial farces such as The Play That Goes Wrong and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery. He’s brought with him his former collaborator, James Marlowe, as novice actor Val and The Fast Show veteran Simon Day as Ester. (Beckett fans will get the reference.)

Both are charismatic — the endearing Marlowe will no doubt go on to better things — but Bell’s clown-based comedy needs a larger stage than the St James Theatre’s small cabaret space and neither actor can spin gold out of such thin material.