Very positive responses to our Godot at the Cidermill Theatre, Chipping Campden.
“The Godot was remarkably good… and the acting impressive.”
Michael Billington, The Guardian, Chief Drama Critic 1971 to 2019
“I saw the recent Godot with Ben Wishart and Lucian Msamati in the West End but honestly thought the Cidermill one much better.”
Dr Peter Smith – Reader in Renaissance Literature and author of Social Shakespeare
“The production sustained an ingenious and moving balancing act between the play’s slapstick comedy – Gogo straining to pull off his stinky boots and Didi and Gogo frantically swapping hats – with a genuine pathos. At the opening of the second act, for instance, Chris Jury’s Vladimir, thinking that he had lost Estragon for good, chased back and forth across the stage in a blind panic and the production insisted that, for all their bickering, these two indigents were joined at the hip, nurturing one another with carrots, radishes and life-affirming human conversation: ‘We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?’ Paul Ansdell’s Gogo huffed, puffed and kicked the empty air every time he was reminded that they could not leave as they were waiting for Godot, his petulance both comically childish and profoundly hopeless.
It was in this paradoxically grumpy mutual dependency of Vladimir and Estragon that the production scored its most palpable hit. Jury sported a shock of long white hair which he tucked delicately back before putting his hat on for the umpteenth time. There was a Learean majesty about this gesture which hinted at a back story of grandeur: how the mighty had fallen. Ansdell’s Estragon, on the other hand, brought a grouchy despondency to his role, his repeated gestures of independence –‘I’m going’, he asserts no fewer than eleven times – an exercise in self-fulfilling futility. Elsewhere the two of them squared up and paced towards each other across the width of the stage in the manner of gun-slingers as they traded their increasingly far-fetched insults: ‘Moron! Vermin! Abortion! Morpion! Sewer−rat! Curate! Cretin! Crritic! [sic]’ So well co-ordinated were these two actors that Jury and Ansdell served the production vividly by offering a single combined performance brilliantly in excess of the sum of its parts.”
Chris Jury 