Thematically pairing two very different plays and running them in repertoire has become a popular and rewarding exercise. At the increasingly confident Northampton Theatre Royal, director Rupert Goold has come up with an Irish season that comprises the obvious - Conor McPherson's The Weir - and the less obvious: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. I have not seen the former, but the latter is a cracker.
Goold takes some liberties, beginning the evening with the image of a small boy sitting quite alone, watching and waiting, in a derelict building (in fact the pub setting for The Weir) and Ray Lett's design sets the piece firmly in a familiar rural Irish landscape of rocky outcrops and tumbledown stone walls, rather than the traditional blasted no-man's land. This may reduce the existential angst of the piece but it greatly increases its sense of humanity.
David Ganley's bumbling, childlike Estragon and Paul McCleary's absurdly optimistic Vladimir are like a couple of chancers who lose their way home from the pub one night and find themselves marooned forever in one place waiting for the elusive Godot. Their quiet acceptance and resignation tinged with terminal despair is oddly moving.
The genuine sense of human beings made of blood and beating hearts exacerbates the horror, too, as Gerard Murphy's tyrannical Pozzo passes through and Estragon and Vladimir stand by and do nothing to help the downtrodden Lucky.
What Goold's production does exceptionally well is to make the audience complicit in the waiting of Estragon and Vladimir. There is never any doubt that what we are watching is a play: the curtain comes up and down between acts, and the pair's antics clearly belong to the music hall.
It is a performance. But a performance that we all share, just as we share the waiting and the uncertainty. Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for Godot. We are waiting for Waiting for Godot to end. For a terrible moment there is doubt in my mind that it ever will. When the curtain finally comes down it is a huge relief. I mean that as a compliment.
Until March 2. Box office: 01604 624811.
