Once and for all we’re gonna wait for Godot, on a quad bike
I went to the theatre twice this past week. On Monday it was the Arches in Glasgow, for Once And For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, a fantastic show about teenagers which I first saw at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and loved so much that I just had to see it again. On Thursday it was the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, for Waiting for Godot, with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen (and Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup too, not that you’d know it from most of the publicity). Very different shows, right? Aha, maybe not.
I was ready to dislike Waiting for Godot - mainly, I admit, because everyone else has seemed so excited about it and I’m a contrary fecker. ‘Casting to die for,’ cooed the Daily Telegraph. ‘A once in a lifetime theatrical event.’ Now, is that because Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are particularly qualified to play these particular characters, beyond just being wrinkly enough? Or is it because they’re 1. very, very famous, 2. have been friends for years, ooh, a bit like Vladimir and Estragon and 3. were both in X-Men. Whatever gets folk through the door, I suppose, but do people have to bang on quite so much about how privileged non-Londoners should all feel, especially because the show - heavens above - is touring the provinces before it reaches the centre of the cultural universe? Oh, maybe they do. Look at the evidence. One starstruck provincial fan was so excited that he made a home video about it and posted it on YouTube. You should watch this - it’s sweet, sincere, and made completely without cynicism. An example to us all. Possibly.
In the end I enjoyed Waiting For Godot a lot, even if I wasn’t completely convinced by Patrick Stewart as Vladimir (he seemed a bit too clear-headed, somehow, for a man trapped in forgetfulness, raging against Godot’s repeated failure to turn up one minute then regaining his hope the next. Or maybe I just can’t shake off the idea that under the bowler hat and tatty suit is Captain Picard, braced to save the day with his steady leadership). And Ian McKellen was tremendous, finding as much nuance and poignancy in the silences as in the words. Aspiring young theatre actors, watch and learn. At the end of the show, they do a cute little dance together. Look, someone sneakily filmed it on their phone.
When I thought about how much I was probably going to dislike Waiting for Godot, I tended to compare it with how much I was going to love Once And For All… Did I mention what a fantastic show it is? Audacious, funny, exciting, the best thing I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer? Watching a bunch of lippy tweens staging a near riot in a grown-up venue like the Traverse - screaming! dancing! pretending to be high! covering themselves in paint then crashing a fucking quad bike on to the stage! - was exhilarating. At last, a show that celebrated teenage excess instead of going all Daily Mail (or, its often equally blinkered mirror image, the Guardian), fretting, judging, demonising and scaremongering about the terrible influence (whatever) is having on young people today, and the terrible things they might do to scared grown-ups as a result.
Once And For All has a lot in common with Waiting for Godot, oddly. Its cast basically perform the same scene, the same time-passing rituals, over and over again, with slight variations each time. Like Vladimir and Estragon, they’re sort of trapped. They know their attempts at rebellion are futile, because it’s all been done before, but, as one of the girls says, ‘not by us’, so they’re going to do it anyway, and on a fucking quad bike if necessary. After each scene, though, they have to tidy up. They’re still kids, after all. What’s really clever about Once And For All is that it hints here at a bigger metaphor - we are all trapped by the knowledge that everything we do has already been done, and will be done again, by the knowledge that we are a tiny, insignificant detail in a very big picture. The kids in Once And For All are just beginning to learn this, and they rail against it defiantly. The old tramps in Waiting For Godot have long resigned themselves to it. They want someone to tell them it’s not the case, that what they’re doing isn’t pointless, but deep down they know it’s not going to happen. Not having a quad bike, they pass the time by doing little music hall turns instead.
Like Godot, Once And For All went against my expectations, this time around. It was being restaged as part of Behaviour, which used to be called the Arches Theatre Festival until the venue’s new director, Jackie Wylie, decided that was too staid a name for the kind of festival she wanted it to be - edgy, sexy, boundary-pushing, as likely to appeal to the venue’s audience of clubbers as its audience of theatre-goers. In Jackie’s own words, it’s a ‘multi-artform encounter with our persistent desire for transformative communal experience’, which makes it sound a bit like something you’d do on drugs. Dude, check out the trippy trailer.
.
In theory, Once And For All’s teen riot was the perfect opening show for Behaviour. Except that, oddly, putting it in the Arches took away a lot of its power. Teens rioting in a venue like the Traverse feels thrillingly subversive. Oh my God, what if they break something? Then they’ll be in trouble! In the Arches, the show just looked like any other Saturday night at Death Disco. It all felt a bit tame, actually.
A lot of this was down to the staging. At the Traverse, the audience surrounded the performers on three sides. With the teens and the nervous grown-ups right in each other’s faces at all times, it felt far more confrontational, like the riot could spill over into the grown-ups’ space at any moment - which, let’s face it, is why adults are so afraid of teenagers in the first place. When the quad bike crashed on stage, my heart was in my mouth; I thought they were going to get carried away and actually crash it into the audience. I left the show with paint on my shoes and a massive grin on my face, wanting to shout and scream or maybe take all my clothes off and run around. At the Arches the teens felt contained, caged in a conventional theatre space. It was still a good show, but just a show. So, I came out thinking, what shall we have for tea?
I’m happy to have seen both these shows in the same week. It reminded me that theatre is a living, ever morphing thing. In going to see Once And For All at the Arches, of course I wasn’t seeing the same show again. You can’t do that with a live performance, particularly with theatre. That’s what’s so special about it. I’d seen Waiting for Godot twice before this week, and usually don’t have much interest in seeing classics over and over again, but I still felt rewarded by this one. By Ian McKellen’s shrugs and facial tics. By Simon Callow’s fabulous red face and pompous snarling. By him off Star Trek, too, even though his voice sounded a bit wrong.
Andrew
