Word: estragon
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...merits. Cornuelle's ingenuity shines through her apocalyptic set, an outdoor sandcastle lit by torches. It's clearly not the kind of sandcastle on which uplifting dreams are built. Since only futility wafts through Beckett's dreams and illusions, this purgatorial anti-Eden perfectly suits Vladimir and Estragon, the two main characters, who wander helplessly in search of the mysterious Godot...
...very little. What is intriguing about this imitative gesture is the sacrificial element involved in the picture of Beckett, suffering terribly from huge corns and terrible calluses, walking only with great pain. He must have pulled off his shoes in much the same way as his character, Estragon, pulls off his horrible misshapen boots in the first act of Waiting for Godot with a sigh of infinite relief...
...version of Becket, perhaps entitled "En Attendant Fletcher." The act limps by as the characters wait for the arrival of their accomplice, and the tensions between them continue to build. Mamet, it seems, wanted to show the ultimate powerlessness and futility of his characters, like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, but without the existential mantle that cloaks Becket's fine work and gives it its legitimacy, Mamet simply cannot pull it off. There is just not enough of a plot to give his idea any weight, and what little there is is far too flimsy to bear...
Mercier and Camier was finally published in France in 1970, and Beckett then translated it into English. In the light of all he has written since, this early novel seems positively pastoral. Two seedy stumblebums named Mercier and Camier, forerunners of Estragon and Vladimir in Godot, set out on a mysterious journey through vaguely Irish scenery. Mercier is "a big bony hank with a beard," and Camier has a "red face, scant hair, four chins, protruding paunch, bandy legs, beady pig eyes." Naturally their amblings attract attention. A policeman who sees them warns: "This is a sidewalk, not a circus...
...limits of the play are clear precisely because the current off-Broadway revival is as good as one can legitimately imagine. Man's parlous state on this spinning planet is beautifully rendered by Henderson Forsythe's Vladimir and Paul B. Price's Estragon. As the slave Lucky, Anthony Holland mimes with the aching dignity of a Marceau, though his master, Pozzo (Edward Winter) is a shade too Blimpish. This is Alan Schneider's finest piece of directing since Virginia Woolf-sentient, taut, sharp as the image in a jeweler's glass...