“I saw it as a comedy,” says Martin of his reading of the play. Sadly, we only have a few clips of the performance, which you can see in the grainy video above, interspersed with interviews with Martin and Irwin. Murray Abraham as Pozzo, Bill Irwin as Lucky, and Lucas Haas as the absent Godot’s messenger boy. Mike Nichols directed, and the rest of the cast included F. Williams and Martin weren’t its only big draw. Newhous Theater on Broadway, sold out almost immediately. The production, which took place in October and November 1988 at the 299-seat Mitzi E. It is fitting then-and might meet with the approval of Beckett himself-that Robin Williams and Steve Martin, two of the most riveting physical comedians of the seventies and eighties, should step into the roles of the bumbling, bowler-hatted frenemies of Godot. Godot’s central characters, Vladimir and Estragon, evoke one of the most renowned of comedy duos, many of their gestures “obvious derivations from Laurel and Hardy,” as film historian Gerald Mast notes.
“Beckett once wrote a film script for Buster Keaton,” notes theater critic Michael Kuchwara.
Veteran vaudeville comic Bert Lahr, best known as The Wizard of Oz‘s cowardly lion, starred in the original Broadway production of Waiting for Godot in 1956. It’s true that some of Beckett’s characters spend all of their time onstage immobilized, but the playwright was also a great admirer of physical comedy onscreen and drew liberally from the work of his favorite film comedians. In Beckett, however, characters don’t just tell jokes about the wretched exigencies of human life, they fully embody all those qualities just as the best comic actors do. The deepest laughs are found, as in that old Mel Brooks quote, in the most absurdly tragic places. Indeed, it is because of these things that he remains a singularly great comic writer. Despite the dourest demeanor in literary history and a series of plays and novels set in the bleakest of conditions, there’s no doubt that Samuel Beckett was foremost a comic writer.
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