Waiting for Godot: Review

‘A country road, a tree’. The setting for Beckett’s play is surely as synonymous with the text as ‘blasted heath’ is with King Lear, and in director Dominic Hill’s assured stage setting looks just as desolate. A spectral tree with the mangled remains of a car door wrapped round its trunk dominates the space against a backdrop of never-ending road and bare telegraph poles resembling crucifixes. The production unites lifelong friends and actors Matthew Kelly and George Costigan as Vladimir and Estragon replete with fulsome beards and downbeat tramp attire.

The pair are stuck in a doom loop of waiting for you-know-who and wile away their time in petty bickering and philosophical musings. The scarred landscape (Beckett modelled it on Roussillon where he holed up during the Nazi occupation of France) is served in the production by the ragged placement of car seats acting as respite against the elements, the ground speckled with dirt. The lighting in particular deserves special mention for the soft hues it throws onto the stage, suggesting hope for when a new day eventually dawns.

Kelly and Costigan are a joy to watch, their dependency on each other as sad and wistful as it is necessary. The finish each other’s sentences, grimace and groan in unison, embrace and withdraw just as sharply, and take delight in each other’s misery. A true friendship then. Costigan gives us a Vladimir to remember, by turns hopeful and disdainful, his Salford accent providing a caustic edge to the character’s ruminations on life and death. Kelly is the more morose of the two, employing lugubrious facial expressions to convey the depths of his despair, the perfect foil to Costigan’s optimism.

But this is not just a two-hander: there are notable performances from Gbolohan Obisesan as slaver driver Pozzo and Michael Hodgson as the unlucky Lucky. Obisesan enters the stage with Lucky on a leash looking like a cross between a warlord and a rapper and delivers what can only be described as masterful portrayal of this enigmatic character. It is Hodgson, however, who deserves – and gets – most credit as the put-upon Lucky. He is bloodied from rope round his neck and infected with pus but retains a vital spark of humanity. When he is told by Pozzo to ‘think, pig’, Hodgson had the audience spellbound with his difficult monologue and was rewarded with a just round of applause.

The play is a treatise on the human condition and the monotony of life – ‘habit is a great deadener’, Valdimir reminds us – but what it shows most clearly is that out of boredom and waiting comes humour (it’s easy sometimes to forget how funny the play is), friendship, and entertaining diversions.  While waiting on the road we never quite know who may turn up, even if it’s not the person we’ve been waiting for all along. Having miserably failed to hang themselves, Kelly and Costigan stand motionless in indecision unsure whether to stay or go, an apt metaphor for the human condition.

A must-see show.

Waiting for Godot is at The Octagon Theatre, Bolton from 15 April to 2 May 2026.