Waiting for Godot @ The Lyceum, Edinburgh, 22 Sep

Famously ignored and decried on its premiere 60 years ago (the late theatre critic Bernard Levin was particularly scathing, dismissing it as ‘a really remarkable piece of twaddle’), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is now recognised as one of the most important plays of the last century. So it is perhaps no surprise that Beckett’s most influential work has been selected by the Lyceum’s outgoing artistic director, Mark Thomson, as a swansong of sorts, and the first production in the Lyceum’s seminal 50th anniversary season.

Beginning in a bleak and anonymous wasteland, underneath a windswept tree, two tramps, Estragon (Bill Paterson) and Vladimir (Brian Cox) wait for the mysterious Mr Godot of the play’s title. Unaware of place, time or the reasoning behind their sojourn, they fritter away time discussing various subjects, interrupted only by the arrival of the extravagant Pozzo (John Bett) and his servant Lucky (Benny Young).

As a play, Waiting for Godot is gleefully subversive, a wonderfully absurd piece of theatre, peppered with enigma, mystery and a growing sense of dread. As a double act, Paterson and Cox are sublime, like a darkly comic duo, thrown into Michael Taylor’s desolate and unwelcoming wasteland set and left to their own devices.

Unsurprisingly, Thomson’s production is more comedy-driven and the actors more likely to go for laughs, yet throughout the play Beckett still manages to provoke and unsettle with moments of sadness, cruelty and frustration, six decades after its maligned premiere. Not bad for a ‘piece of twaddle’, eh?

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Waiting for Godot, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 'til 10 October