Even if you don’t follow much theatre, you might have heard about Waiting for Godot.  It’s the famous play by Samuel Beckett, which premiered in France in 1953, about absolutely nothing.  Two guys wait on the side of a road for a few days – then the curtain falls.  End of story.

And though it might sound like a weird form of audience cruelty, Waiting for Godot has actually been electrifying and intriguing viewers for decades.  Vancouver audiences can decide for themselves whether Waiting for Godot is a masterpiece or a bore this month during the play’s run at the Cultch, presented by Blackbird Theatre.

A little history helps put the play into context.  Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot following the unspeakable violence of World War II – during a time when the existing order didn’t seem to make sense any longer.  This was a time of existential angst about the meaning of life, religion and our role in the world.

Against this backdrop, Beckett crafted a kind of “theatre of the absurd.”  There is almost no plot.  The dialogue between the two main characters – Estragon and Vladimir – is simple, repetitive and sometimes nonsensical.  The staging is minimalist as well – dominated by a spare stage with a single tree in the background.

Photo credit: Tim Matheson

Blackbird Theatre stays true to the original spirit of Waiting for Godot in its production at the Cultch.  This is a bare-bones, stripped-down version, with none of the campy comedy  of past Broadway productions.  There is humour, of course, but it is tempered by an atmosphere of menace.  Among the play’s most disturbing scenes is the vicious, unexplained cruelty meted out to the character ironically named Lucky.  Estragon and Vladimir look on but do nothing in the end to stop the abuse.

At the least, Blackbird’s Waiting for Godot is thought provoking – and no less relevant in our era as when it was written in postwar Europe.  It runs through Jan. 21 at the Cultch in East Vancouver.  Tickets start at $16.