Waiting for Godot review – Matthew Kelly and George Costigan are a bleakly funny double act

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Productions of Samuel Beckett’s modernist classic often evoke the world of music hall. The duelling routines of Vladimir and Estragon recall the banter of old-time vaudeville acts. A sequence of hat-swapping could have come straight from Laurel and Hardy.

Echoes of that remain in Dominic Hill’s staging, a co-production with the Liverpool Everyman and Bolton Octagon, but his approach is less end of the pier than end of the road.

The backdrop far behind Matthew Kelly (Estragon) and George Costigan (Vladimir), who always gravitate to the front of the stage, is a lost highway, its telegraph poles fading into the distance, its material ripped and worn to reveal the walls of the theatre. Central to Jean Chan’s design is a post-apocalyptic tree, charred, barren and tapering, as if pointing an accusatory finger at the heavens.

At its base is the carcass of a truck that, under Lizzie Powell’s lights, sometimes looks like a coffin. Even the safety curtain has a morbid air as it grinds upwards.

We are at the end of history and yet life goes on. “We should turn resolutely towards nature,” says Kelly, momentarily taken by the tree’s single leaf. The seasonal cycle continues however threadbare the material that fills each day.

“What are we doing here?” Costigan asks the audience with the house lights up. And of the two, he is the cheery one. In a parka held together with dirt and a sports shirt long since robbed of its shine, he repeatedly tries to galvanise his partner. He is a font of strategies to pass the time.

For his part, Kelly is morose and irritable, all sore feet and no sleep, needing to be cajoled into staying for the comic crosstalk. With their northern English accents and wild beards of grey, they are an excellent match, capturing the irascibility and interdependence of a couple who no longer know what day it is, still less what happened yesterday.

Got up in purple and yellow, Gbolahan Obisesan as Pozzo intrudes into their sepia desolation like a dream, commandeering a gaunt and panting Michael Hodgson as the unlucky Lucky. If these are the end times, they are callous and cruel. Bleakly funny too.