Estragon: “Let’s go.”
Vladimir: “We can’t.”
Estragon: “Why not?”
Vladimir: “We’re waiting for Godot.”
We don’t wait much anymore.
In a world of techno-mediated instant gratification, we don’t need to. One-click delivery, algorithmic feeds and entertainment aimed precisely at our predilections make sure of that.
And it’s not just that we don’t have to wait. We’ve forgotten how. The spaces where we might feel the ache of waiting—the need to do something, or say something … anything… to fill the void—have been colonized by the attention economy’s endless calls to distraction. And this already strange world grows stranger by the minute, as AI consumes more and more of our effort and interaction.
So it feels unquestionably alien to silence your device, suppress your distractions, and enter an analog space where questions hang in the air, silence gapes, and mysteries mount and refuse resolution. In other words, to enter a world of waiting.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has been called a play where nothing happens … twice. It’s a fair summary: Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps, wait by a barren tree for someone named Godot, who never comes. They bicker, philosophize, confect various methods to pass the time, briefly consider suicide, are briefly interrupted by the bullying Pozzo and his enslaved Lucky, and then receive word that Godot won’t come today. Then do all of it, all over again.
Moments … and mismatches
Waiting for Godot is not a work driven by its plot: it’s an accumulation of tragicomic moments conjured by the specific actors waiting in the barren space before us. And at the Stratford Festival’s vast Festival Theatre, directed by Molly Atkinson, these moments landed for me in surprising ways: funny, poignant, and maddening of course—but also accusatory, in a way that I didn’t expect.
Paul Gross’s Vladimir is lanky, loping and curious, and Tom McCamus’s Estragon is loud, blunt and declarative. Vladimir is nimbler of mind, sharper of memory, and softer of voice; while Estragon asserts certainties and launches bodily complaints with fervor, sidesteps them in comically nimble ways, and is forever announcing “I’m leaving”… before not doing so. Gross lifts and embraces McCamus more than once, with a palpable rough-edged tenderness: they are a bickering odd couple joined by a bond that feels surprisingly strong, like love.
The production grounds itself in this kind of tactile, physical comedy and contrast. McCamus does ongoing and wonderfully epic battle with his shoes, while Gross takes up arms against his hat. And the two end up in a truly hilarious pileup atop the fallen Pozzo (Jonathan Goad) and Lucky (David W. Keeley) in Act Two. Goad delivers two striking and diametrically opposed versions of his character. Act One’s is an ultra-confident, dapper mansplainer, who seems to fill every inch of the stage space. The second is a broken, blinded shell, his power reduced to barely-audible offers of hard cash to anyone who will help him stand. In a play that is otherwise built on repetition-with-variation, Goad makes the mysterious rupture between his two selves feel particularly devastating.
David W. Keeley’s Lucky, a hulking figure bent to the smaller Pozzo’s will, makes for another striking contradiction. His famous monologue—a command performance torrent of gibberish-that-isn’t-gibberish, which empties the tank of his indentured body and imprisoned soul—earned a mid-show ovation at the performance I saw. And finally, the soft-spoken Boy (Gordon Paul Miller and Asher Albert Waxman, alternating) registers as a fish very much out of water: truly young, he feels at risk, delivering unwelcome news to unpredictable and disappointed adults.
Vast … yet small
Atkinson makes exceptional use of the thrust stage’s vastness. Under Jareth Li’s oppressive full lighting, we feel the full size of it. Pozzo drives Lucky across its full length like a wagon-train … straight into some kind of crashing calamity in the tunnels beneath our seats. Vladimir and Estragon repeatedly ascend and descend the steps around the stage, mount lookout spots at the far right and left, and repeatedly circle the tree which is the stage’s sole adornment.
But though it feels expansive, we can’t help but recognize the stage’s tininess, especially compared to the real world. The angular and denuded tree feels small and sadly of-this-moment, in a world where we bulldoze nature and subsist off its carcass. These mercurial but fully realized characters exist in this big-yet-small place before us, where they work doggedly to find, create, or just imagine the possibility of meaning.
And their quest for meaning accumulates for me into something I didn’t expect. In this director and these actors’ hands, Vladimir and Estragon’s unself-conscious struggle to fill the time feels less like absurdity and more like resourceful heroism. The duo are confused and deliciously funny, yes. But they are also earnest, and invested, and (dare I say it) noble, in wrestling some kind of meaning from the void that surrounds them, without ever losing hope.
The challenge
Watching them wait—and watching audience members watch them wait—I felt a larger and distinctly modern challenge that the production poses.
“I can’t go on like this,” McCamus’s Estragon pronounces loudly—more than once. “That’s what you think,” Gross’s Vladimir replies with quiet irony.
In the last 25 years, our society has collectively decided that we can’t wait like this: alone with ourselves and our questions. That’s what you think, this smart Stratford production replies.
And so, as we sit for two-and-a-half hours around this vast-yet-tiny stage, we begin remembering what it is to wait. Of course, we then power up our noise-cancelling devices and exit into distraction. But something lingers: a silence we can no longer completely fill.
Vladimir and Estragon will be waiting again tomorrow. How about us?
Waiting for Godot runs at Stratford’s Festival Theatre through July 31, 2026. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
