Nothing happens.

And yet. Waiting for Godot is one of the highlights, if that's the right word, in London culture this week

Ben Whishaw, Tom Edden and Lucian Msamati in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket

I realise this makes me sound like an insufferable arse, but Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a bit of a seminal work for me. My first encounter with it was in print, reading it rather than seeing it, and it made me incandescent with rage. I was a teenager and I couldn’t believe that someone had written something so dense in which absolutely nothing happens. For some reason it made me livid. 

After I found out a bit more about Beckett, and saw it on film (in a freezing, over-air-conditioned ICA cinema, which was both deeply appropriate and deeply unpleasant) I began to get the point, but it also taught me that liking something is not necessarily the only valid response to a piece of art. It should alter your equilibrium, but there are many ways that something can do that.

The new production of the play, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, starring Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati, is an incredibly good one. The cast is excellent, giving their own unique flavours to roles which are very difficult to make your own, because of the strictness of the Beckett Estate’s guidelines.

It’s also, as you might expect, an absolute endurance test. Definitely for the audience, and certainly for the actors. I’ve forgotten how deliberately, agonisingly repetitive it is - especially for the actor playing the luckless Lucky, Tom Edden in this case, who got a round of admiring and sympathetic applause after his Big Bit (you’ll know it once you’ve sat through it).