Oh My Godot!: This outdoor staging of Beckett's masterpiece is unforgettable

Telegraph

14-04-2025

It's not often you can describe an outdoor production beset by rainfall as unforgettable, in a good way. But seeing Waiting for Godot amid the rolling, panoramic upland outside Enniskillen – the Northern Irish town where Samuel Beckett was sent to school in 1920 in his early teens – the sense of bleak and droll occasion was doubled and then redoubled as rain started to lash the pitter-patter interactions of theatre's greatest double-act, Vladimir and Estragon.
It's such a simple, apposite idea to present Beckett's 1953 masterpiece al fresco (in Cuilcagh Lakelands Geopark to be precise) – its setting is so starkly unsheltered: 'A country road. A tree. Evening'. Seán Doran, doyen of Beckett extravaganzas, has presided over site-specific iterations of the play here before during his larger 'Happy Days' festival (2012-2022). Still, this is the first time they have arranged the two acts across consecutive days, thereby honouring the time scheme of the work.
It marks a major moment nicely: this is the 70 th anniversary year of Godot's English-language premiere, and Beckett was born on Good Friday, 1906 (April 13). This venture strives to draw on Godot's post-war context and contemplation of the human condition, and localise it. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the town's conflict-riven past are being broached with canny heritage trails and socio-cultural discussions and even with cross-border casting. Doran has another trick up his sleeve, too; in a watershed moment, Oh My Godot's second round at Easter sees the Irish actress Olwen Fouéré join Alex Jennings and Malcolm Sinclair (in the leads) to play the hapless Lucky. It is apparently the first time the Beckett Estate has sanctioned a female actress to play one of the male roles.
I'm tempted to hop back and see – again – the play in which, famously 'nothing happens, twice'. Despite it all being script-in-hand, Conor Grimes and David Pearse were contrastingly spellbinding, one snappy, the other sheepish, as the vagrant 'Didi and Gogo', wearing bowlers and overcoats, surreally planted by Antony Gormley's stainless-steel tree.
A big bonus was that the cast (completed by a barking Andrew Bennett as Pozzo, a bedraggled Tadgh Murphy as Lucky and a sweetly tender Lorcán McManus as the Boy) relocated to Beckett's (and Oscar Wilde's) alma mater, the Portora Royal School (now Enniskillen Royal Grammar School), for the second act on Sunday, to avoid a serious downpour. Sitting in the wooden-floored assembly hall that the adolescent Beckett would have frequented, these surroundings threw the play's hierarchies, power-play and puerile joshing into relief.
I don't think Doran – who's also organising a major Brian Friel retrospective in North-West Ireland from this summer – has his equal anywhere else in the UK; he lets literary giants bestride the landscape afresh.