One thing’s for certain – Alex Foster is a passionate director. No sooner have I met him and enquired innocently about how the play is going, than he begins to enthuse about the merits of his cast, how they have “bought into it completely”, and the ways in which they have coped with the at times very bizarre script. This enthusiasm is no mere fluff either – he is a geographer, and one of the first comments he makes to me is surprisingly technical for a director. “There is a thing in Geography called the precariat which often consists of people simply passing the time…having your daily life that goes on and on and on, and that’s what’s being echoed here in Godot”.
He has clearly not chosen to direct this play on a whim, and talks about the importance of immersing his audience in the characters of Vladimir (Stratis Limnios) and Estragon (James Mooney), the two protagonists whose repetitive and unfathomable lives we follow in the course of this surreal play. He hopes that this immersion can be created by holding the play “in the round” with the audience on all sides of his actors in the intimate Burton Taylor Studio.
When I ask him about the conception of Waiting for Godot as overwrought and ultimately boring, he assures me that this production will not suffer from such criticism. He hopes to play to the more humorous aspects of the play, since in his words “if you were there with your best friend for eternity, you wouldn’t be bored”. This is not, I don’t think, to say that the poignancy of some of the tragedy in the play will be lost – the protagonists contemplate suicide at two separate points, for example – but the emphasis on humour seems a genuine attempt to make the pairs of Vladimir and Estragon, and Pozzo and Lucky, more realistic, and to imply tragedy through the jarring humour rather than overbearingly drum it into the audience.
Many keen French students, for whom Prelims are lurking at the end of this term, will perhaps note with some glee that this is an opportunity to see one of their texts performed and feel like they are revising (despite the production being in English) while enjoying an evening of thought-provoking theatre. A clever marketing strategy there, perhaps, by the production team. Nevertheless, if even half of Alex’s eloquent zest for this play translates onto the stage, it will be a terrific production.
Just before I am about to leave, he gives me a sound-bite which could easily be a Prelims French essay question: “the hardest thing about waiting is that you know there will be more waiting to come. [Discuss.]” Not long to wait for this Godot, however, running at the BT Studio from Tuesday 6th May.
