Alasdair Stuart's Blog

When I was seventeen, my skies were full of George Adamski’s saucers and Jesse Marcel’s crashing Greys, all monitored by things wearing immaculate suits and the faces of men. The Truth was always out there, just out of sight and always on the verge of being revealed. The aliens hadn’t landed on the White House lawn but they were definitely on their way. Seventeen years later, they’re still on the way and apparently bringing the awful truth about the star gate under the Persian Gulf and the half-dolphin super-soldiers being created to fight the upcoming wars with the creatures that live beneath the Earth and regularly menace NASA employees with them. UFOlogy is a million ring circus, the possibility of finding something interesting buried far too often beneath the sort of conspiracy theory that tends to veer into ‘They come for our women and anal cavities!’ territory. In fact, the only thing worse than that is when something interesting is genuinely uncovered only for it to be reported on in a way which boggles belief in the age of the cameraphone. Lenses unfocus, pictures never come out, microphones are turned off and The Truth remains something which is always at one remove from you. Urban myths like it out there, and they’re in no hurry to be dragged out into the light of day, or, at the very least, under a decent CCTV camera.

Enter the Fresno Nightcrawlers, stage left, moving very oddly.

In late 2008, Jose, a Fresno resident, was woken late at night by his dogs barking in a very unusual way. When he checked the CCTV fitted to his house, he saw two odd creatures walking across his lawn. Jose was terrified but kept the tape and, eventually, approached Univision 21, a local TV channel about the incident. They, in turn, contacted Victor Camacho, a local UFO investigator and member of international body MUFON whose talk on the case brought it out into the open in 2008.

That holy trinity of separation, investigator to confidant to witness is very common, the information still held frustratingly out of arm’s reach and the situation isn’t helped any by some of the editing choices made on the video. For no readily apparent reason, a second of footage of an animatronic grey alien is used as a scene buffer, Camacho even apologising for this. Even worse, the footage itself is never spliced into the report. Instead, at several points we watch the footage from Jose’s CCTV camera being played on a TV which is in turn being filmed by another camera, the image all but lost beneath huge pixels, interference and a frankly surreal editing decision. It’s not even like the rest of the film hasn’t been post-produced, after all someone thought a second of animatronic Grey would be a good idea, but for some reason no one thought to splice in the original footage.

What’s tragic about this is that the Fresno Nightcrawlers might just be something incredible. The camera watches a tall, thin creature with no arms walk slowly across the lawn, stop and then proceed onwards. A few seconds later, a creature which looks for all the world like a billowing pair of trousers follows it, the flaps of it’s clothing, or body, clearly visible blowing in the wind. It’s less than two minutes long, you can barely see what’s there but what’s there looks strange, different, alien. If it’s a fake, it’s a great fake and the more you look, or squint, the more you see exactly how odd these creatures are. There’s a natural gait to their walk’ and they appear almost relaxed, ambling through Jose’s garden in the same way that people browse in a shop. They look confident, assured and crucially you see them moving for a relatively long time, something which is all but unheard of with most ‘alien’ videos. A couple of seconds, if you’re lucky, is usually all you get but here you get a clear view, a locked off camera and a chance to take a good look at whatever is using Jose’s lawn as a shortcut. Or you would do, if anyone had thought to encode the original film and upload it. Instead, you’re left squinting at something which might be incredibly important, on a TV screen, being filmed and shown on another TV screen. The million ring circus strikes again, the truth stays just outside the light.

But for all that, I keep coming back to the Fresno Nightcrawlers and their oddly polite amble through Jose’s garden. I’m fascinated by what they could be certainly, but the stage magician in me is curious as to how it was faked, if it was. An episode of Fact or Faked looked at the case and ruled out puppets and a person in a costume but nonetheless, if it is faked, it’s a fantastic piece of work, somewhere between a performance piece and digital art. What haunts me about it though, is its banality; these ridiculous, geometric creatures, collections of white stick limbs and cloth, look a little rubbish in a completely convincing way. They amble, they stop, one of them rushes to catch up with the other. They look for all the world like tourists walking down a foreign street and there’s something rather charming about that. To paraphrase the old line, perhaps they’ve not only been here for a long time, they’ve done some sightseeing. I hope they got an I HEART FRESNO bumper sticker.

“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men

long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”

I’ve never really got on with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. With the notable exception of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, both of which cleverly play with his monolithic physicality, Schwarzenegger’s action roles leave me cold. In some cases, such as Conan the Destroyer, it’s because the film itself is just flat out bad but in most cases it’s because I never, for a second, believe he’s in any physical danger. The curse of the ’80s action hero was to be invulnerable, the rock against which the villains break themselves and Schwarzenegger was the one who suffered the most in this regard. Stallone was able to balance the death bringer of the later Rambo movies with the perenially down on his luck Rocky, Van Damme’s entire career was based around the concept of the ‘good man pushed too far’ and Willis traded, and continues to trade, on being an average guy in an impossible situation. To a greater or lesser extent, they all bleed, they’re all vulnerable, they’re all mortal. Schwarzenegger isn’t, and this is never more apparent than in Predator.

One of the iconic action movies of the last thirty years, Predator is a neat combination of late-run Cold War paranoia and flat out action. A special operations team, led by Schwarzenegger’s Col Dutch Schulz, is dispatched to Guatemala along with a CIA liaison officer to rescue a group of politicians. Instead, they find themselves forced to destroy a rebel encampment and, even as they realise the CIA have used them, they are tracked and killed in short order by an invisible alien hunter. It’s a devastatingly simple premise and it sits at the centre of the web of ’80s action movies. The CIA liaison, Dillon, is played by Carl Weathers who in turn played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, the Predator itself is played, briefly, by none other than Jean Claude Van Damme and Hawkins, the only member of the team to resemble an actual human and not a superhero, is played by Shane Black who wrote Lethal Weapon and, in The Long Kiss Goodnight and www.wordwww.wwwwwww is responsible for two of the best action movies of the last three decades. Predator, in short, has a pedigree. However, it also has Schwarzenegger, which presents a problem that nearly sinks the movie; a near total lack of physical threat. There isn’t a single moment where you believe, for a second, he’s in any physical danger culminating in him outrunning what appears to be a miniature nuclear explosion with no ill effects. He’s an elemental force rather than a man, a Hero who knows he’s bulletproof and the end result is a film which feels oddly flat when it should be visceral and brutal and painfully human.

It’s a problem that’s dogged the series as a whole, with each successive movie featuring the Predators trying a different approach. The sequel, Predator 2, attempted to solve this by casting Danny Glover in the lead and largely succeeded whilst the Alien vs Predator films went a step further, expanding on the Predator culture in one instance and having the Predator act as a ‘cleaner’ in the other, a constant physical threat prepared to kill anyone to cover it’s presence and that of it’s prey. They all worked, to a greater or lesser degree, but none of them focussed in on the horror at the centre of the concept, instead focussing on the basic, iconic element of a huge alien hunter that kills us for sport. It’s a beautiful, pulpy concept but it’s one which is shallow, light, a confection spun out of blood and bullet casings.

Predators is the first entry in the series that stops trying to fix it. Instead, it embraces the insubstantial nature of the central concept and uses that to create a story wich is both gleefully stereotypical and far darker than anything that’s gone before it. If Predator was the product of the Cold War-riddled ’80s and Predator 2 was born of the urban paranoia and early millennium fever of the ’90s then Predators re-invents the series for the 21^st Century, stripping everything away to create a story about a group of hugely troubled, largely doomed people unsure of what they’re fighting for or if they should be fighting at all.

Everything the film does right is wrapped up in the two central characters of Royce and Isabelle and the supporting character of Noland. Royce, played by Adrien Brody, is the antithesis of Schwarzenegger, a lean, calm figure who excels at looking after himself but has no desire to be saddled with looking after the others. He’s everything Dutch isn’t, a quiet, almost reticent loner who is intimately concerned with his own survival and only slowly allows himself to care about other people. Brody is easily the best part of the film, and there’s an odd, restrained formality to how he plays Royce which is a neat contrast to the broader characters that fill out the cast. Royce isn’t the head of a team of soldiers, he’s not a hero, he’s not even physically imposing. Instead, he’s a quiet, oddly polite man who is able to take almost all the challenges they encounter in his stride because, when it comes down to it, he has absolute confidence in himself. Royce mentions the Hemingway quote at the top of this article, and that willingness to accept the horrific idea that they’re being hunted is something which marks out the film as very different from it’s predecessors, clearly staking out Royce’s place as a man who thinks before he fights. There’s no posturing, no machismo, just a smart, calm man attacking the world with his brain more than his fists in an attempt to survive. Royce is a cold and ruthless excuse for a hero and at one point he effectively uses the others to draw the Predators out into the open to try and learn about them. It’s a brutal manouvere and one that Isabelle calls him on only to have Royce list everything they’ve learnt from the incident. He’s quite up front about the fact a man is dead as a result of his decision and, without saying it out loud, makes it clear that this is a price worth paying. It’s quite a departure from Schwarzenegger’s leader of doomed men and gives Royce a far clearer narrative journey from cold, intellectual loner to reluctant leader than Schulz enjoys in the original. He’s not a good man, he even admits as such, but he has potential to be something other than just prey or hunter.

Alice Braga as Isabelle is very much the other side of the ideological coin. Where Royce is a private operator, Isabelle is an Israeli Defence Force sniper who lost her spotter shortly before being abducted. She’s desperately focussed on people in exactly the way Royce isn’t and a lesser fim would have made it clear that this was because she was a woman and therefore weaker than Royce. Thankfully, the film never goes down this route and Isabelle is not only set up as a consistent voice of human conscience in the group but is even given a reason for her actions. She chose to let her spotter die instead of dying in a futile attempt to save him and this incident haunts her and colours her actions. Crucially, she’s also the only member of the group to have an inkling of what’s really going on and where they really are. There’s a nice piece of duality in the script where Royce refuses to tell anyone his name and Isabelle criticises him for it even as she does the same thing and, worse, holds back the information she has until Royce calls her on it. She’s humane but not fully human and just as Royce gradually learns to accept her she learns to open up to him. Thankfully, there’s never a hint of anything romantic between the two and instead they are presented as equals, people who are aware that they need each other to survive but who also accept that they have a lot in common. It’s a partnership born of necessity, a desperate human connection on a world which sets out to punish anyone not focussed entirely on survival. They cover each other’s backs and whilst that’s not enough, it’s all the comfort they can afford.

Noland, played by Laurence Fishburne, perfectly demonstrates the direction Royce and Isabelle could have taken. He’s a quiet, reticent figure just like Royce and, just lke Isabelle, lost someone close to him shortly before being taken. The difference between them is both simple and vast; Noland survived at the expense of other people, subsuming everything from his smell to his sanity to survive. Fishburne has instinctive presence and his scenes are amongst the film’s best, especially the casual ways that he lets us see the damage Noland has taken. When he first appears, literally thanks to a stolen Predator cloaking device, he’s the epitome of calm, efficient death. This is a man who had done the impossible, not only surviving on a planet-sized game reserve but killing two of the hunters. However, He’s completely sane until he starts talking to someone who isn’t there, is fully prepared to kill the other characters to acquire their technology and has given up in exactly the way Royce and Isabelle hasn’t. Noland has chosen survival at the expense of living, and whilst he has a roof over his head, food, defences and enough knowledge to survive, he doesn’t have people, or companionship. Noland has evolved in exactly the same way the Predators have, cutting away everything he doesn’t need to survive and as a result, completely isolating himself from not only his humanity but the chance of regaining that humanity. In stark contrast, Royce and Isabelle choose living knowing full well they may not survive.

The film revolves around these three people and the choices they make, with the other characters providing the connective glue with the rest of the series. Former mixed martial artist Oleg Taktarov plays a Russian soldier whose weapon of choice is the mini-gun from the original film, whilst Topher Grace and Walton Goggins score as an unassuming doctor and a death row inmate respectively. It’s an excellent cast, but none of them are characters in the same way that Royce, Isabelle and Noland are. They’re connective tissue with dialogue, part of a structure designed to support the long dark night of the soul that Royce, Isabelle and Noland all go through in very different ways. Each is hunted, each is pursued and each chooses their moment to stand and fight and who they stand with. As the film closes, it becomes clear that Royce and Isabelle have a taste not for hunting, but for life, and nothing less, red in tooth and claw and short as it may be, will do. They are the predators, just as Royce realises early in the film but, for the first time, they’re comfortable with that. The hunt continues but, for the first time, the hunt continues on their terms.

29^th November 2010

There’s a moment I’ve not been brave enough to experience for fifteen years. It’s a moment I’ve thought about a lot and, like everything in my life which I think about a lot, I’ve analysed it to death and been absolutely convinced that I knew what it would feel like and as a result, it didn’t matter if I was never brave enough to experience it. After all, bounded, king of infinite space, or as popular ’90s beat combo Go West would have it, wishful thinking.

The moment is this; I’m standing by the side of a Judo mat before my first lesson. I take a step forward and my bare foot makes contact with the mat for the first time, ever. It’s a classic bit of hero’s journey rubbish, exactly rhe sort of thing that arts post grads get mocked for, Bilbo in a gi muttering about how the road goes ever on and on even as he’s being shown how to choke someone out using their jacket. It’s a moment I’ve thought about for fifteen years and it’s a moment I experienced tonight.

The Railway Institute Judo Club owns a first floor balcony at the Railway Institute gym in York,. It;s a brilliant building, huge and arched and sitting somewhere between Dickensian and steampunk, tucked away behind the RI building itself which is, in turn, tucked into the side of the Victorian pile of York Railway Station and less than two minutes away from the city walls. Inside it’s all wooden floors, badminton courts and, in my case, the slight hint of boiled cabbage and echoes of ‘You’re the fat kid’ that I’ve had since my first games lesson at school.,

Let me tell you something about being not only the fat kid, but the fat geeky kid. It’s a fine identity, a lot of the time, especially if, like me, you’re able to parlay it into the ‘Overweight, Smart, Funny Man’ identity, or, at least, convince enough people you’re that that it doesn’t really matter. It enables you to be clever, funny, nice, a little odd, a little eccentric. It means you can be the Doctor without the TARDIS, Venkman without the Ghostbusters, Giles without Buffy and that last one is particularly apt. Because you see, one of the things I’ve come to realise about myself is that I go English and I go English hard in physical situations. I went to two lessons of boxercise eighteen months ago and I distinctly remember throwing right crosse during pad work, somehow wasting some of the only breath keeping my ridiculous frame from expiring on making jokes. My partner pointed this out, I re-focussed and I threw a punch that could actually do some damage. The lesson here is clear; shut up, stop talking, accept three facts;

-I am six feet and one inch tall

-I am broad shouldered and built large

-I do not feel comfortable with either of those facts.

I’m a brain in a meat suit and I’m always a quarter step back from that suit, that’s how it feels sometimes. I’ve done sport before, more so than I wanted to to be honest, given that I was drafted into my school rugby team based on the fact that I look like a wall but it’s always been something I’ve done not something I’ve enjoyed. Sport has been something that was foisted on me rather than something I chose, and that’s not healthy, literally. Sport, physical exercise, should be something that I enjoy for God’s sake, I mean, how else am I going to look like Henry Rollins as well as think like him?

Which brings us back to Judo, that rarest of breeds; a sport I’ve been interested in for years because it seems suited to people with my body mass, is a fantastically good way of getting confident and getting fit and crucially does not involve me getting punched in the face, because, after all, I’m just too pretty. See my previous comment about being funny rather than concentrating, something which I was all too aware of before I even turned up.

Matt Wallace is one of the best writers I know, and I know a lot of writers. His podcast series, The Failed Cities Monologues, is a toweringly ambitious two-fisted Rashomon take on cyberpunk, exploring an engineered war from the streets it’s fought on to the people moving the pieces around on the board. He’s also a ridiculously dangerous man, a former pro wrestler and martial arts polymath. He’s also built like me, which is why I asked Matt for advice about what to do before I went along. He told me three things that, I suspect, are going to be the cornerstone of my approach to the martial art:

Be silent

Be receptive

Be respectful

That was what was going through my mind tonight as I took that first step. There was none of the Bilbo, no hint of Joseph Campbell, nothing special about it, especially as I had to walk across the mat to get a jacket from the club’s stash which just about fit., but that didn’t matter. I took that first step, I felt the mat bend beneath my foot and it felt…normal, real. It didn’t feel like coming home, that’s the sort of metaphor that’s reserved for people who write about sports professionally instead of simply badly, as I’m doing here, it felt like…opening a door into a new room, one that I’ve always been meaning to open, and finding out the room inside is filled with potential.

You see, the thing I’ve only just started to figure out about the hero’s journey is that the concept itself is a misnomer. The hero’s journey is a destination, an ending as you begin the transformation from small hobbit who wants to be left alone to ringbearer, or farm boy to Jedi knight, or any of the thousands of other examples. It’s the point where real people’s stories end and characters’ stories begin. Real people’s stories begin in a Scott Pilgrim t-shirt and a pair of tracksuit bottoms with dodgy elastic and slightly unsettling bloused ankles that make them, or, in this case, me, look a little like I’m wearing pantaloons.

I still took that first step though. And all the ones that came after it as well as the breakfalls, the hold downs, the sacrifice turn, the throw and sparring. I was silent, I was receptive, I was respectful, I got my arse well and truly handed to me and I learnt not just about the art but about myself. As first steps go, it was a pretty good one.

Angry Robot is a new science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint from Harper Collins. Their first two books launch this week, with the next two arriving in August and, as a friend of mine is the assistant editor on the line I was lucky enough to be sent review copies of their first four titles; Moxyland, Slights, Book of Secrets and Nekropolis.

With the web now all but ubiquitous and Twitter beginning to crest into something genuinely fascinating, it seems eminently appropriate that one of Angry Robot’s first books is a remarkably tech savvy thriller with a very different perspective. Moxyland is set in Capetown, ten years into a future where connectivity and online communications has become something close to currency in its own right and being offline is tantamount to being an outcast. Toby, a slacker who toys with the underworld finds his life intertwined with Kendra, a woman so desperate to be accepted she’s become a sponsorbaby, a nanotech enhanced living advert. At the same time, Lerato, a corporate programmer who is as bored as she is brilliant and Tendeka, a revolutionary trying to bring down the corporate culture choking her hometown take actions that will bring them into the orbits of Toby, Kendra, and each other.
The genuinely difficult thing about near future science fiction is to make it both convincing and different. Don’t do enough and it becomes a contemporary thriller, do too much and it becomes dystopian science fiction. On top of that, the ghost of Blade Runner hovers like Banquo over the proceedings, daring authors to tilt at the definitive Cyberpunk windmill.
Moxyland avoids all those pitfalls due to three very simple, highly effective elements of the book. The setting is the first and most important, Cape Town becoming a vibrant, fascinating, evolving city that shares DNA with Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles and Akira‘s Neo Tokyo but is still a unique entity in its own right.
Secondly, the book is cheerfully pragmatic, the characters all flawed, normal people with the same concerns we have, albeit projected ten years into the future. These aren’t Cyberpunk stereotypes, strutting around, flexing their cybernetic angst muscles but normal, flawed, slightly desperate people. Finally, there’s the book’s cheerful, maniacal invention, taking in everything from the sponsorbabies to art with genetic structures and sculpted attack dogs. It’s a resolutely normal, resolutely different, fascinating world that Lauren Beukes has incredible fun showing to her readers. As debut books for both the author and the line go, this is as good as it can get.

Slights by Kaaron Warren is the latest in a series of novels which are slowly but surely rebuilding the horror genre as a rich, inventive field. Stephanie kills people. She’s very, very good at it and the fact she does it has never bothered her until now. Because Stephanie’s mother is dead, Stephanie almost died in the same accident and when she did, she went to a room fillled with all the people she’s ever killed. They bite and scratch and claw at her but she survives, only to become more and more obsessed with the room, the people in it and what it feels like to die instead of kill.
Slights is about as horrific as its possible to get, a novel that trawls the depths of human depravity to explore what happens at the edge of human understanding. Waaron has a keen ear for prose and dialogue and a very strong sense of the normal, making the horrific events of the book all the more unsettling. Where Moxyland drops you in at the deep end and allows you to swim to the edges, Slights holds your head under water until you almost black out, lets you up, then does it again. This is kitchen sink horror, pragmatic and savage, brutal and human all at once. This is a story the Man in Black would be happy to tell and I can think of no better praise than that.

Chris Roberson’s Book of Secrets heads up the second pair of releases, scheduled for the 6th of August. Spencer Finch is a reporter searching for a book that everyone from cat burglars to monks seems to want. It’s a difficult case, a rabbit hole that he finds himself running headlong down and that appears to have something to do with a chest of golden age pulp magazines left to him by his grandfather. Something terrible is bound up in the book of secrets, and whether he likes it or not, Spencer’s life is intimately connected with it.
Expanded from Voices of Thunder, one of Roberson’s earliest novels, Book of Secrets incorporates many of the author’s favourite tropes. The love for golden age pulp is here as is the idea that books hold power, that ideas have weight and shape and form. It’s a fascinating book, paced at breakneck speed with a hard nosed first person narrative and some great offhand jokes. A lost Greek play is referred to as ‘No Mr Nice God’, armies of masked vigilantes parade across the page and the true history of mankind is revealed. Which isn’t bad going for a journalist who just wants to file a story.
The real star here is Roberson’s easy going prose, that carries some big ideas along with elegance and grace and places the story in a unique hinterland somewhere between steampunk and action thriller, weaving Spencer’s life into ancient Greek literature and the pulp stories written by his grandfather. It’s arguably the most commercial of the four books but that isn’t to say that it’s the least. This is a smart, literate thriller written by an author whose love for the form is clear.
There are a million stories in the dead city in the pit, a million lives and unlives powered by deceit and passion. Some of them get in trouble, some of them need help and some of them find Matt Richter, a private eye who is already dead himself.
Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner, does similar work to Roberson’s Book of Secrets in so far as it crosses genres. However, here the two genres are supernatural thriller and hard boiled crime, Matt Richter’s unlife owing as much to Raymond Chandler as it does to Mary Shelley. This is, after all, hell and Matt is not so much the Chandlerian ideal as a man trying to do in unlife what he tried to do in life; the right thing, no matter the cost. It’s a tough sell, bringing these two genres together, but Waggoner’s dark city of ash and bone is the perfect connective tissue for the story, raising it above cliché and into realms of surprisingly dark horror. This is the first in a series of three stories and I’m fascinated to see where Waggoner goes next.

A quartet of disaffected twenty and thirtysomethings, a serial killer who wants to die, a journalist on the trail of pulp history and a private eye deader than most murder victims. Four unique protagonists for four unique books, all of which bring something new to the table be it author, perspective or style. This is a great start for the imprint, a quartet of unique, fascinating voices that make a powerful statement about the imprint’s intentions as much as tell good stories in their own right. This robot should be angry for a long time to come and that does nothing but bode well for genre fiction.

An empty stage that isn’t a stage, but a broken extension of the theatre around it. The stage boards warp upwards, a tree breaks through in one spot and a ditch runs left to right in front of what appears to be the back interior wall of the theatre. If it is, it’s clearly seen better days. To the right of stage front there are two arches, a ruined balcony, to the left, nothing.

The stage is empty. The stage is waiting.

A hand appears. An old man hauls himself painfully out of the ditch and hobbles down to the front of the stage. He takes his boots off, shakes them out, looks around him with a mixture of pain and resignation. Suddenly, a booming voice from off stage yells ‘THERE YOU ARE!’ and another man appears, all motion and bonhomie were the first is silence and frailty.

On balance, it’s not the most likely opening for a comedy.

Waiting for Godot is one of those plays, that, like Hamlet and to some extent The Cherry Orchard, has become elemental, almost a part of the fabric of theatrical drama as much as a play in it’s own right. Superficially at least this is down to the fact that Godot is a play where everything is stripped away and back, where the stage is bare or in this case broken and all that’s left are two men trapped in the moment before the moment.

When I went to see Hamlet last year, I wrote about how the bare bones design of the theatre helped the performance immeasurably and this production of Waiting for Godot, if anything, takes it a step further. Here, the set is present but it’s a broken mirror of the theatre and the implications that raises are fascinating. It instantly gives the production a sense of intimacy, stage and audience melding to create a single environment in which the audience are present but passive, invisible apart from a nagging sense of unease every time the two tramps glance our way.
For Vladimir and Estragon though, this set has even more significance, the empty theatre providing the topography of their relationship. Estragon drags himself on stage from below, Vladimir dances into view from the wings, a tramp and a ragged-edged song and dance man killing time waiting for the man that never comes.

Of course, with a cast like this, the two tramps aren’t alone, at least initially. Mckellen is best known as both Gandalf and Magneto, both roles with tremendous genre fiction cache and a tremendous amount of baggage. After all, entire generations have been introduced to Tolkien’s work by Mckellen’s gentle, regal wizard and the current success of Marvel Studios’ movie adaptations owes a tremendous amount to Mckellen’s spiky, angry, furious, Erik Lehnsherr.
Neither of those two men, or Mckellen himself make an appearance on stage. Instead, Estragon limps into view, smaller than any of the other three men, more damaged, more frail and somehow angrier. Mckellen’s Lancastrian accent seems made for Beckett’s circular conversations and Estragon’s dour wit and the long-suffering way he approaches every situation is by turns charming, hilarious and tragic. Estragon is the passive half, always tired, always confused, rarely moving but Mckellen gives him a very dark energy when that changes. The casual, fervent malice with which he suggests attacking the badly wounded Pozzo and Lucky speaks to a lifetime and more of victimisation, of a man who has been kicked for years suddenly realising he’s no longer the one lying on the floor. There’s a tiny flash of triumph, a tiny moment of vindication and then he’s trapped in the same moment he and Vladimir have spent their lives inside; the moment before the blow hits, the moment before the decision is made. He wants to kill himself, he wants to leave, he wants to stay with Vladimir, he wants to sleep, he wants Godot to give them meaning, he wants a carrot even though he’s eaten the last one. Estragon’s tragedy is just this, a gluttony of potential and a paucity of action. He wants everything and in wanting everything, gets nothing.

Stewart’s Vladimir also comes to the stage with company. As well as decades of work as a theatrical and movie actor, Stewart also has two iconic genre roles; Captain Jean Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier who, like Mckellen’s Erik Lehnsherr is one of the foundation stones of Marvel’s current fortunes. Like Mckellen, Stewart appears to have examined each of the best known qualities of both these roles and his previous work and taken a deliberate step in the other direction and, like Mckellen, the result is startling.
Where Picard was articulate, eloquent, measured Vladimir is a stream of consciousness given form, saying anything and everything just to fill the space that Estragon leaves, to kill time, to fill the silence. Where Charles Xavier is measured, compassionate, considerate Vladimir has a hint of petulance to him, a sense that he’s looked after Estragon for long enough, that he wants things to change, that he’s sick of the fact they aren’t and if something doesn’t change soon? He’ll not be responsible for his actions.

Except, of course, he has no actions to take. He wants to leave Estragon, he wants Godot to come, he wants to be seen, to be noticed. Denied even Estragon’s occasional, blissful ignorance of their situation, Vladimir is a man alone on a darkened stage and there are times in the production where he lets himself realise that and Stewart curls up, foetal with horror, in the background.

Of course, neither man is completely alone or, in fact, complete. Together they form a barely functional individual, Estragon’s pragmatism balancing Vladimir’s slightly desperate cheer to the extent they can think and at times focus. Ironically it’s this very security that locks the two men in place, neither willing to be the first to break the partnership up and both all too aware that without the other, they’re nothing. It’s this realisation, this slow acceptance of both their co-dependancy and the doom it brings that leads to a single, inescapable conclusion;

Vladimir and Estragon are Morecambe and Wise in hell or, at best, limbo.

They are the elemental double act and Stewart and Mckellen embrace the tenderness and humour that stems from that. There’s something impish about the pair of them, a barely contained glee that whilst the world has passed them by they have, somehow, won. They’re still here, still breathing and if they can have a little fun before they go then it’ll make the time pass all the faster. It’s a peculiarly English take on the play and the ghosts of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise are present on stage at least as much as those of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The fact the production’s first curtain call sees these two towering pillars of English theatre perform a gloriously bad soft shoe shuffle to ‘Underneath The Arches’ only drives the point home; Vladimir and Estragon may be trapped between moments, but there’s fun to be had even there.

Whilst the ghosts of double acts past and future wait with them, Vladimir and Estragon are also joined by Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo, played like a Pickwickian nightmare by Simon Callow is all colour and energy and volume whilst Lucky, played by Ronald Pickup is a silent beast of burden, a broken man whose single moment of terrifying, unending lucidity is both supremely funny and utterly terrifying. They don’t so much make an entrance as kick the door in, Lucky dragging Pozzo behind him on a huge rope, Pozzo bellowing precise instructions for so long that it becomes funny, then horrific, then funny again.
They’re a curious, troublesome section of the play, giving it a sense of geography and place that at first seem to damage the atmosphere Beckett works so hard to create. But as the scene goes on, it becomes clear that Pozzo and Lucky are as questionable, as disturbing as Vladimir and Estragon. One pair are static, the other constantly in motion, one pair are reluctant equals whilst the other are master and servant. One pair understand where they are in life, the other have no inclination to do so. Pozzo and Lucky aren’t just the embodiment of everything Vladimir and Estragon are not, they are the embodiment of everything the two tramps push against; needless action, heedless movement, struggling to reach an ill defined destination. Vladimir and Estragon may not be going anywhere but they know exactly where they’re not going and that, sometimes, is enough.
Interestingly, Pozzo and Lucky also serve as a warning for why Vladimir and Estragon can never take action. Their appearance in the second act, blinded and injured by something terrible waiting in the wings (Perhaps, as my wife pointed out, something that happens in the other play they are on their way to and from) turns them from a controlling, threatening presence to the only thing lower than the two tramps and Estragon’s quiet, fervent suggestion that they attack them shows exactly how dangerous the two leads have the potential to be. They are two men with everything to gain but who are so frightened of losing the possibility of action that they remain paralysed, held in place by the chance of change. They are a held breath, a stifled scream and that’s where the true horror of the play lies.

But horror isn’t what Waiting for Godot is about, or certainly, not this production. Ultimately, it’s a play about friendship that endures everything, even the end of friendship itself. The untidy, messy boundaries of intimacy, the ability to finish one another’s sentences and jokes, to salve and open wounds is something that is common through every close relationship in society from marriage and siblings to work place and team mates. We are more when we are together and that realisation, that acceptance that it’s better to be more than the sum of your parts is what binds these two men together. It also lies at the heart of the deadpan humour and laconic wit, the gentle, almost sly acceptance that they’re playing to an audience and that audience is loving every minute of it. This is, in short, a play about having fun. After all, you have to do something whilst you’re waiting for Godot…