Theatre review by Steve Bennett at the Arcola, London

There has been a long history of comedians performing Waiting For Godot. Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson did it in the West End in 1991, Steve Martin and Robin Williams did it on Broadway in 1988, Max Wall did it in Manchester in 1980 and a young Barry Humphries did in in Melbourne back in 1957. Now sketch double act Totally Tom - aka Toms Palmer and Stourton – have thrown their battered hats into the ring for a powerful new production on the London fringe.

The marriage of comics to the play is usually a successful one, for as Samuel Becket said in another of his plays: ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.’ Beyond his elliptical, tragicomic dialogue lies some traditional double-act dynamics – and with Vladimir and Estragon usually portrayed in bowler hats, comparisons with Lauren and Hardy are inevitable.

For they are different shades of the same character, both wretched and none-to-bright they are co-dependent and perpetually bickering. Palmer’s Vladimir, or Didi, is the determined Olly, aspiring to find a way out of his desperate situation, Estragon, or Gogo the more resigned Stan. And like all good sitcoms, the characters are inextricably trapped in their situation – no matter how elusive or existential the agent of that entrapment is

Making their theatrical debut, the Toms confidently grasp the nettle of bringing a modern edge to the play, bringing out both the futility of their itinerant situation and the dark situational humour.

There are moments of pure physical pantomime as they monkey around, killing time, while their rhythms and emphasis wring laughs out of the script that Beckett may never have envisaged. Yet they also respect the philosophy and futility of the text with compelling, performances that add humour and subtract pretentiousness, but still convey the play’s essential meaning.

At 26, these two old Etonians are much younger than the characters are normally played, but if anything that adds desperation. Their nihilism of having no future is more potent because it comes when they should be at their peak, rather than being tramps near life’s end.

We meet them on a stage that has been reduced to a pile of rubble, spewing out of the bare walls of the Arcola Theatre, filling the ether with a cloying dust to match the greyish tones of the piece. The central tree a stark, near-lifeless trunk somehow surviving through the crumbled brickwork at the centre of designer Patrick Kinmoth’s starkly beautiful set.

Kudos, too, must go to Jonathan Oliver who plays the domineering Pozzo as an East End gangland boss in dapper waistcoat and leather pork-pie hat, who’s intimidating, charismatic and volatile in equal measures. As his enslaved human ‘pig’, Lucky, Michael Roberts very effectively spins his character on a dime, the dumb lackey one minute, the autistic, Tourettic philosophiser the next.

Waiting For Godot was once memorably described by a critic as a play ‘where nothing happens - twice’ yet in the time-killing conversations lie many intriguingly ambiguous thoughts about the repetitiveness and futility of life. And once the music-hall messing about has stopped, Stoughton and Palmer bring the inherent pathos of Vladimir and Estragon to the fore.

• Waiting For Godot is on at the Arcola Theatre, Dalston, until June 14. Review date: 13 May 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett