‘Godot’ and ‘No Man’s Land’ in New York

Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart have become, at 74 and 73, New York’s hottest new vaudeville team.

These knights of the British theater — known to Americans respectively as Gandalf the Grey (in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) and Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Star Trek: The Next Generation) — are kicking up their heels in two of the most depressing plays every written: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s No Man’s Land, in repertoire at the Cort Theatre. And guess what? They’re hilarious — the actors and the plays alike.

Where nothing happens

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Beckett wrote. “It’s the most comical thing in the world.” Beckett’s understanding of the futility of life has never been more entertaining than with Stewart and McKellen as those immortal tramps, Didi and Gogo, who are waiting for someone named Godot (whoever he is) to come and save them. In the skilled hands of these consummate artists, the essence of this tragicomedy comes to life in a fresh, new way.

Godot, wrote the Irish critic Vivian Mercier when the play opened in 1953, is “A play in which nothing happens, twice.” He’s right, at least in Aristotelian terms. Two tramps sit waiting by the roadside in a no man’s land. We don’t know who they are, where they are, how they came here, and so on. They talk. One exits briefly (to urinate). He returns. The other asks for a carrot. He eats it.

Two strange men arrive. They talk some more. The strange men leave. A boy arrives, saying that Godot won’t come today, but will come tomorrow for certain. The boy leaves. The moon rises. “Let’s go,” Didi and Gogo say to each other. But they don’t move. That’s the sequence of events in Act I, and it’s repeated all over again in Act II.

Beckett’s script calls specifically for the tramps to wear bowler hats — the standard accoutrement of the vaudeville performer — and they fit McKellen and Stewart to a T. Both men are schooled in the tradition of the English music hall, and so they take to vaudeville like fish to water. Every moment is a “bit,” every interchange is a “number.” Even when they talk about their “Savior” (which they do with significant frequency), it’s a comedic routine. If their timing falters, Didi demands, “Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?”

Just watching McKellen as Gogo slumped on a stone, trying to put on a torn old shoe, is a study in the art of fine acting. He’s a lump of discarded humanity — a crumpled sack of old rags, with skinny limbs and tufts of hair protruding. His pathetic struggle to make the shoe fit — with Didi’s tender aid — tells the whole story of their symbiotic relationship. They speak of parting, but they don’t. After all, Didi says, “We’re all of mankind, whether we like it or not.”

McKellen and Stewart — intimate friends in real life — bring a genuine humanity and warmth to counterbalance the bleakness of their circumstances. “Tell him we’ve kept our appointment!” Didi entreats the boy to deliver the message to Godot. Is the boy more than a messenger? An angel, perhaps? Will Godot ever come? In the world of Beckett’s play, nothing is certain except the loyalty and affection these two old souls feel for each other — and their steadfast commitment to waiting.

Bleak and bleaker

Pairing Beckett’s masterpiece with Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1975) is a stroke of inspiration. If you think Beckett’s landscape is bleak, wait ’til you venture onto Pinter’s. With Beckett, at least you’re sure of one thing: Didi and Gogo are together, waiting, no matter what. In Pinter’s world, you’re sure of nothing. His slippery slope is perilous — “forever icy and silent,” as one character describes it.

In Act I of No Man’s Land, Hirst (played by Stewart) sits in a throne-like armchair in his dark baronial drawing room, drinking whiskey, while Spooner (McKellen) — a ratty-looking stranger he’s found on London’s Hampstead Heath — lurks in the shadows with his coat in his hand, begging for asylum. Who is Hirst? Why is he surrounded by frightening bodyguards? Why has he invited Spooner in? And when Hirst collapses on the floor, dead drunk, why doesn’t Spooner help him up?

Suddenly, in Act II, Hirst and Spooner are talking to each other like old friends, calling each other by completely different names, referring to a shared past of Oxford school days and a woman they both loved (Hirst’s wife, Spooner’s mistress). Which reality is true — Act I or II? Friends or strangers? Shelter or danger?

Director Sean Mathias has done Pinter a service by staging the play as a scathing comedy of menace, rather than a nightmarish piece of perverse absurdity (as Pinter wrote it). As a result, he gives us a Beckett/Pinter double bill of complementary worldviews. Whether you see life as a glass half empty or half full, you’re treated to both.

Ultimately, the joy of these paired plays lies in watching the bravura performances of two knighted actors who, between them, represent over 100 years of acting at its finest. Whether Godot comes or not, we still have McKellen and Stewart, “laughing wild amid severest woe,” dancing the two-step at the curtain call. Comedy trumps tragedy, according to this duet. “Together again at last!” says Didi to Gogo. Here’s hoping it stays that way.