D: Luk Perceval
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is famously a play of many questions and few answers. In the Berliner Ensemble’s rendition, director Luk Perceval heightens both the frequency and intensity of those questions, taking his audience on a breathless journey with very little time for rest or reflection. Set, costumes and particularly the music underscore that this will not be the conversation-driven waiting game one expects.
The play does not confine itself to the stage (both music and action overflow into the audience). It even turns its prompter into a character, having her read stage directions out loud and occasionally step on stage. Wandering around the desolate theatre, filled with old lighting equipment and thick cables, both protagonists – Matthias Brandt as Estragon and Paul Herwig as Wladimir – play their roles with particular hopelessness, though Brandt does manage to imbue an impressive amount of nuance and depth into his fatalism.
Oliver Kraushaar figures as an almost excessively intense Pozzo, and Jannik Mühlenweg gives a disturbingly animalistic performance of Lucky. Between the ferocity of the acting and the sheer amount of sensory stimulation, the performance feels far shorter than its two-and-a-half hours. Unusually for an evening of theatre (if maybe not for Godot), one might have hoped for a little more boredom.
- Berliner Ensemble, Bertolt-Brecht-Platz 1, Mitte, Jul 6-7 and Oct 1-2, in German with English surtitles, details.
