Arts

The friends and Bill & Ted co-stars have reunited to play another pair of existential losers: Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. What did the critics make of it?

They partied on, dudes. On Sunday night the stars turned out at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway for, in theory at least, a most excellent opening night. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, aka Bill and Ted, were about to start their run in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot playing Vladimir and Estragon, the double act taken on by celebrity pairings including lan McKellen and Patrick Stewart.

Close friends since their twenties, the stars of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and two sequels (Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in 1991 and Bill & Ted Face the Music in 2020) are the latest high-profile actors to join forces with the director Jamie Lloyd — the British wunderkind of transatlantic theatre or its most hit-and-miss director, depending on your point of view. Recent hits include Evita with Rachel Zegler and Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Scherzinger. Misses include a dire The Tempest with Sigourney Weaver and a lacklustre Romeo and Juliet with Tom Holland – though the latter was, like most Lloyd shows, a commercial success.

Reeves had the initial idea of performing Beckett’s masterpiece. “It came from the universe, and when it struck me it rang a gleeful bell, and so I asked him [Winter] if he wanted to do it,” Reeves recently told The New York Times.

Despite their divergent career paths — Reeves is a global star who can take his pick of blockbuster movies, while Winter has gone down a more indie path as an actor and director — the two have retained their close bond, spending Thanksgivings and Christmases together and “tearing through the canyons of Los Angeles on their motorcycles”. While they each read for both parts – Reeves even suggested they alternate – the John Wick star ended up as the bumbling Estragon while Winter is the more philosophical Vladimir.

Reeves, 61, and Winter, 60, have been at pains to stress that they are not approaching Godot as a Bill & Ted-filtered jape. Their preparation for Lloyd’s show has spanned years, since a lunch meeting in 2022 at which Reeves mimed some of Estragon’s part. Both men studied clowning, and for more than a year met almost monthly to read through the text. Winter, who is making his first return to theatre in four decades, said: “We’re not cavalier … It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’re just going to go be awesome’ It’s, Take it seriously, and do the work.””

In April the pair visited the University of Reading, where Beckett’s archive is kept, to study the original manuscripts and meet Beckett’s 92-year-old friend and biographer, James Knowlson. They also studied butoh, a contemporary form of Japanese dance, and met previous Vladimirs and Estragons.
So how did they do? As the theatre critic for The Daily Beast, I found the production neither revolutionary nor revelatory — though it was saved by Winter’s clear and moving interpretation of Beckett’s linguistic and philosophical blizzard. Despite a striking set designed by Soutra Gilmour, Lloyd seemed uncharacteristically cowed by the material.

But the chemistry between Reeves and Winter was winning, and there was one moment when the audience went wild, raucously breaking the existential gloom.

As their characters mulled the past, the actors replicated the twanging air guitar poses of their stoner heroes. The notoriously strict Beckett estate told The Times that it had greenlit another significant change to the playwright’s directions – the absence of a tree on stage — but it was unclear whether they had been given advance warning of the Bill & Ted reference. “The estate signed off on the characters referring to the tree off stage and there not actually being a physical tree on the stage,” it said.

Other critics were underwhelmed. The New York Times thought the leads had been upstaged by the secondary characters, Pozzo and Lucky (played by Brandon J Dirden and Michael Patrick Thornton). There was a consensus that Winter was the stronger of the central pair; the New York Post described Reeves’s performance as “rough”, adding that “the actor relies on a vacant stare that’s money when he’s playing an assassin on the big screen. Not so much in live theatre.”

Time will tell whether or not such reviews will affect audience numbers. At the time of writing, there are tickets available in all price brackets, from $140 to $700, until January 4. But Reeves’s star wattage may outweigh whatever the critics say — and in Godot‘s favour there are examples from the Broadway season just past.

While the musical appears in peril — according to The New York Times, none of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season have made a profit – the short-run, celebrity-helmed Broadway play has proved more resilient. Last season’s Good Night, and Good Luck, starring George Clooney, and Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal both broke box-office records. Those productions received mixed to negative reviews, and their stars won no Tony awards — usually considered an important commercial boost.

Let’s hope Reeves and Winter’s friendship is shield enough for any brickbats. On opening night Reeves told People magazine that doing the show with Winter was a “dream come true, more than I can ever dream of”.

“We’ve known each other a very long time,” Winter added. “It’s a play about two people who have known each other a very long time, which actually matters, I think, to the play. And Keanu had this crazy, inspired idea that suddenly turned into reality, for both of us.”

“This is the step into the reality,” Reeves said. “It’s fantastic.”

Well, dudes, we shall see.