Phill Jupitus, Al Murray, Ricky Gervais, Mark Thomas, Stewart Lee, Omid Djalili and others on Waiting for Godot.
From Times Online:
If there’s one piece of theatre that obsesses comedians, it’s Waiting for Godot. Great double acts, from Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson to Steve Martin and Robin Williams, have had a punt at playing Vladimir and Estragon — while Buster Keaton and Lee Evans have performed in other parts of Beckett’s canon. Perhaps it’s the vaudeville routines that Beckett used, perhaps it’s the way he takes the props of comedy to support more complex soul-searching. Though his works can be bleak, they can also be very funny. So, we asked comedy’s finest what Beckett the playwright means to them.
Phill Jupitus
The longest-serving face on Never Mind the Buzzcocks started his career as Porky the Poet, supporting Billy Bragg
Godot is the first play I ever saw with professional actors — barring pantomimes. And I. Did. Not. Know. What. The. F. Was. Going. On. Little realising that that was Beckett’s point. It’s a play that’s equally demanding on performer and audience — you can’t help thinking about it after you’ve seen it, even if you only went for a laugh. Beckett loved clowning, but his two favourites — Groucho Marx and Buster Keaton — were as deep, dark and troubled as he was. I wrote a parody in 2006, Waiting for Alice, about Tweedledee and Tweedledum in a copy of Through the Looking Glass that hasn’t been opened for 60 years. It was along the riff of “does a character exist if nobody’s reading them?” We looked at taking chunks from the original play, but you realise it’s so elliptically interlinked that anything you use becomes shallow and redundant out of the context of the whole piece — which is strange when you realise how many routines were sampled. I’m looking forward to the new production because I saw Ian McKellen host Saturday Night Live — which is a big ask for an actor — and he pulled it off. Plus, there are going to be X-Men fans in the audience and they’ll be watching Beckett. I find that delightful.
Robin Ince
A stand-up and writer who usually supports Ricky Gervais on tour and runs club nights such as the School for Gifted Children
My favourite Beckett line is the opening line from A Piece of Monologue: “Birth was the death of him.” A stand-up could build an hour-long Edinburgh show around existentialism, but he nailed it with just one line.
My envy of his writing is about two things: his absolute lack of wastage — even though his lines are about waste and futility — and his confidence with the pause. You can tell truly great stand-ups if they can get to a moment where they just pause for a moment of silence and they still have you and you can see what’s going on in their head. I suppose that’s why comedians are so obsessed with him. It’s because we spend our lives falling over and looking ugly for cash, but Beckett has somehow taken that and raised it to the kind of philosophical level that requires critical acclaim. The only thing that’s come close is The Music Box with Laurel and Hardy, where they have a 10-minute sequence trying to get a piano upstairs, only to meet the delivery man, who says, “Why didn’t you bring it by the road?” They pause, and you think, no, they won’t, but they take it back down the stairs and up the road. In that scene, Stan Laurel is saying as much about the futility of any human task as Beckett at his most profound. Read more »
