Any staging of Waiting for Godot in Southern Ontario will have to contend with recent memories of two other productions. In 2004 Soulpepper mounted the play with the revered William Hutt as Vladimir and Jordan Pettle as Estragon, the two tramps trapped in the middle of nowhere waiting for a man who never arrives. In 1996 Stratford mounted a sold-out production starring Tom McCamus and Stephen Ouimette. Modern Times’s staging directed by Soheil Parsa is attractive and respectable, but lacks both the humour and the emotion that made the two earlier productions so remarkable.

Before the show and at intermission speakers blare scratchy 1920s comic songs. This strategy at Stratford led to a production that emphasized all the music hall references and routines that run through the play. Parsa gives us the tunes, but once it’s over so are any references to the music hall or to presenting the on-stage actors as actors. Ordinarily the relation between Vladimir and Estragon is like father and son (as with Soulpepper) or like older and younger brother (as at Stratford), with Vladimir using all his abilities to persuade the frightened Estragon, whom mysterious “others” beat nightly, to stay with him for protection. Beckett repeatedly identifies Vladimir with the head and Estragon with the feet. Vladimir provides food; Estragon eats it. In Parsa’s hands this relationship is completely reversed. Peter Batakliev gives such a strong, nuanced performance as Estragon and conveys so much of his suffering from pain and boredom that he, not Vladimir, seems the sensible one. Vladimir’s speeches hold far more implications than Peter Farbridge ever mines, especially compared to his illustrious predecessors. The result is that Vladimir’s speeches, some of the most eloquent in the play, come off as so much blather, and his insistence that he and Estragon should keep waiting for Godot makes no sense if Vladimir had any compassion for his friend. We should see that Vladimir uses “waiting” as a way of giving meaning to his and Estragon’s lives. In Parsa’s production this never comes through.

Parsa has more insight into Pazzo and his slave Lucky, who function as negative parallels to Vladimir and Estragon.  Stewart Arnott commands the stage as the loud, conceited Pazzo, while casting non-Caucasian John Ng as a Lucky wearing jika-tabi, traditional Japanese workboots, adds racism to Pazzo’s sins and social commentary to the play. Ng plays the role so much like a zombie that it is doubly startling when he impressively delivers Lucky’s famous nonstop speech of garbled philosophy in such a rational tone.  

Trevor Schwellnus’s disc of a set with its beautiful twisted metal tree emphasizes the play’s theme of circularity, but Andrea Lundy’s mood lighting for certain speeches goes against Beckett’s theme of day as torment and against the text’s statements that night bursts upon us with a sudden pop, not in lovely gradations. Beckett wants night to be artificial to underscore the play’s theatricality. Oddly, especially for a company like Modern Times, theatricality is just what this production lacks. Unlike the rush of excitement at Soulpepper or Stratford, at the end of this Godot you feel you’ve seen a play that is important but dull.