Chicago Tribune - Highly Recommended
"...Rea and Monaghan are famous stage actors in Ireland, and so is Rory Nolan, who powers his way through a rather terrifying Pozzo, one of the visitors to the spot where the tramps wait, alongside Lucky (Garrett Lombard), who is anything but. This is a quartet of masterful performances - close to textually perfect, as far as I could tell, and you can't mess around with Beckett whose estate rightly frowns on any deviations from the abnormal."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...Time passes more quickly while watching Druid Theatre's delightfully mournful production of "Waiting for Godot" at Chicago Shakespeare. Not literally, of course. Well, perhaps time does literally go faster when we feel it's so; that's hard to know in this bended universe of ours. What's important is that a full 70 years after Samuel Beckett originally wrote this famed philosophical vaudeville act, when performed with the type of care and precision on stage in this exquisite production, the work still passes the time, which would have passed in any case, but not nearly so well."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...All in all, the starkest, most darkly funny distillation of Western-not to say human-religious, economic, and social constructs ever poured into two acts. Indeed, watching the marvelous production by Ireland's Druid Theatre Company, directed by Garry Hynes and running now at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, you might find yourself thinking how cluttered and limited most conventional plays can seem by comparison, as they attempt to explore this or that current issue, depict a trauma from this or that corner of contemporary life. Waiting for Godot goes to the absurd heart of life on earth."
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Audiences in need of a bracing, existentialist thwack across the face would do well to make it down to Navy Pier to see Druid Theatre’s touring production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, now visiting Chicago Shakes. Director Garry Hynes has carved out a sharp, angular rendition of the text that leans into the play’s vaudeville roots, while still leaving plenty of gaps for the wailing horror of existence to fill in. It’s funny, until it’s not, except when it’s both."
Chicago On the Aisle - Highly Recommended
"...Samuel Beckett was Irish by birth but a naturalized existentialist of the French line whose most famous native son remains Jean-Paul Sartre. Watching the Irish theater company Druid perform Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" - at once vivid and bleak, its characters dithering and hobbled and resigned to their absurd circularity - I couldn't help thinking of Sartre's "No Exit.""
Stage and Cinema - Recommended
"...The performances were nothing less than powerfully persuasive, enough so that a little despair goes too long a way. The wacky movement choreography by Nick Winston works wonderfully in defining their desperation. So do four bleak words: "Nothing to be done." Starkly pictorial, Francis O'Connor's confined cyclorama - a hill with a tree that pops a leaf - injects a pathetic hint of nature into a surrealistically stylized set."
Let's Play at ChicagoNow - Recommended
"...We must admit we found ourselves a little bewildered while watching this play and not as enthralled as other, some seasoned theater attendees, however, Waiting for Godot seem to bring more than a few people off their feet with applauses; so maybe it was something we missed as we waited in Godot. Views range from highly to somewhat recommend, and we tend to fall in the middle."
WTTW - Recommended
"...As directed by Garry Hynes, this is an intensely physical rendering of the play that takes Beckett’s infusion of comic relief (by way of a number of vaudeville-style bits, including a shuffling of hats and an acrobatic fitting of boots) a bit too far. Nevertheless, Monaghan and Rea are immensely gifted balletic comics even if from time to time their speech is somewhat muffled."
Chicago Theatre Review - Highly Recommended
"...Druid theatre company’s much-lauded production, direct from rave reviews in Ireland, is in Chicago for only a limited engagement. Therefore, theatergoers who wish to enjoy this seldom-experienced dramatic treat need to secure tickets as soon as possible. This absurdist play, often read and studied in theatre classes, really deserves to be seen and heard, in order to be fully appreciated."
Third Coast Review - Highly Recommended
"...The Druid Theatre production of Waiting for Godot is a classic treatment, as required by Beckett’s estate. Companies that obtain the rights to stage Godot are not allowed to make changes in the script or staging."
Picture This Post - Highly Recommended
"...The star of Ireland Druid Theatre Company's Waiting for Godot is Garrett Lombard as Lucky. The character of Lucky, the slave, is the most unassuming yet most profound character in the play. His long speech comes out nowhere, and at first, seemingly meaningless, yet as it goes on, becomes pure Joycean stream of consciousness that is chock full of meaning. Lucky is the play itself-seemingly about nothing, yet it's about everything, all at once. This production is mesmerizing, with a cast that presents the language and physicality of the play in the pure French tradition of farce-whimsical, tragicomic, and devastatingly human."
NewCity Chicago - Somewhat Recommended
"...This is the third production of "Godot" I've seen in as many years and the sense I got after the second, which would have been unthinkable to me in the wake of the first, was confirmed by this one: I just don't think I need to see this play again. Ever? Maybe. But at the very least for the foreseeable future, that indefinite period of which this play is unremittingly concerned. Beckett, like Shakespeare, O'Neill, Chekhov, Williams, Ibsen, Miller, and a handful of other dead white men, is benignly predictable fare in a town whose theater scene could be characterized as anything but. And while Tympanic and Court's productions smartly turned the presumed default of whiteness that the theater world is rightly infamous for on its head, this one features a quartet of blokes each more blanched than the last."
