Nothing Happens (Twice)
MAC Birmingham

WITH the 70th anniversary of Waiting for Godot’s first production, various theatre companies, including Little Soldier Productions, have turned to this iconic play as a stimulus for fresh material.

Merce Ribot and Patricia Rodriguez are Spanish multilingual physical theatre performers who have charted their ineffectual quest to gain the rights to perform Godot while making a living from a song and dance routine for the Andalucian tourist board in a London shopping centre.

The six times daily sales pitch dressed as flamingoes becomes the wonderfully absurd reinvention of Beckett’s characters filling time with empty words while trying to find a purpose for their actions and existence. 

The play seamlessly cuts between an ever more manic and discordant sales routine and a stream of emails from the uncompromisingly pedantic stance of the Becket Estate in response to the actors’ written efforts to gain the performance rights, punctuated with voice-overs from leading male performers who have worked on the play.

Carefully skirting the labyrinthine vagaries of the copyright law, the production adopts many of the elements of the original play from a boy contacting them with hollow advice and the use of potentially symbolic props to the very structure of the performance with its second act reprising key features of the first. 

Even the artificial interval where the actors test their thorough knowledge of the text by challenging the audience to start them off with any line from the play suits Beckett’s use of language frequently detached from its original significance.

This hour-long show directed by Ursula Martinez is a thoughtful and imaginative tribute to the groundbreaking nature of Beckett’s work and a humorous indictment of the regulations surrounding his legacy.

Far funnier than Godot ever was, it still manages to convey some of the profundity without ever dragging.

Now on a national tour but unfortunately only playing for a single night at most venues, this is a production worth seeing and deserving of a much longer run.

Touring until April 21, box office: littlesoldierproductions.co.uk.