Volume 35, Number 19 · December 8, 1988
Play It Again, Sam
By Denis Donoghue
Waiting for Godot
a play by Samuel Beckett, directed by Mike Nichols
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City
Mike Nichols's production of Waiting for Godot is so up-to-the-minute that Estragon (Robin Williams), determined to reduce Lucky (Bill Irwin) to silence, screams the supreme insult available in the Age of Bush: 'You're a Liberal.' En attendant Godot was first performed on January 5, 1953, at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris. In London, it opened at the Arts Theatre on August 3, 1955. In the United States, the life of the play began and nearly ended at the Coconut Grove Play-house, Miami, in January 1956: it was revived, with little popular success, at the Golden Theater, New York, in April 1956 with Bert Lahr as Estragon. On everybody's short list of masterpieces, it is not performed as often as its fame would suggest. Many of those who saw the play at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in New York may have been seeing it for the first time.
Review, 1956 words
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