Adrian Edmondson's Waiting For Waiting For Godot arrives on Radio 4
- Adrian Edmondson has reimagined Samuel Beckett's bleakly funny masterpiece as a Covid-era play for Radio 4 in which he stars alongside Kiell Smith-Bynoe
- Simon Callow, Christopher Ryan and Madeleine Paulson also appear in the 45-minute comedy, which satirises the Government's abandonment of the arts sector at the start of the pandemic
- Edmondson has been obsessed with Waiting For Godot since childhood and repeatedly drew inspiration from it in his double act with Rik Mayall
Adrian Edmondson is returning to Waiting For Godot, with a comic reinterpretation of the play set at the start of the coronavirus lockdown, airing on Radio 4 later this month.
Edmonson has been obsessed with Samuel Beckett's bleakly funny masterpiece since childhood. He played Estragon to Rik Mayall's Vladimir in a run of the play in London's West End run in 1991. And the pair famously channelled its nihilism into the slapstick violence of their sitcom Bottom.
Edmondson has written Waiting For Waiting For Godot and also stars alongside Ghosts' Kiell Smith-Bynoe in the 45-minute comedy.
The pair are actors halfway through a run of Beckett's play in Manchester on 17th March, 2020, the day after then Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the nation on television, offering mixed messages about whether theatres should remain open and whether the public ought to attend.
The actors find themselves wondering will the show go on? Will it close? Will they ever get paid? Will they ever work again? So many questions. But the person who can answer them still hasn't turned up.
Alongside Edmondson's character, The Sofa Surfer, and Smith-Bynoe's The Equity Dep, the play also features Godot veteran and Beckett enthusiast Simon Callow as The Hoarder, plus Edmondson's The Young Ones and Bottom co-star Christopher Ryan as Unlucky Jim, a version of Beckett's Lucky who knows more than he knows about the lockdown partying in Downing Street. Madeleine Paulson appears as Voice On Tannoy.
Airing on 18th March, Waiting For Waiting For Godot is produced and directed by former Radio 4 comedy commissioning editor Caroline Raphael for her company Dora Productions (Adrian Edmondson - Signs Of Life, Just William... And Richmal).
Interviewed on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 2023, Edmondson recalled that when he and Mayall met as students at Manchester University, they both "thought Laurel and Hardy were the best of comedy. The other thing we shared was our love of Waiting for Godot. We were the only people who thought it was a funny play."
Reflecting on one of their student productions, he said: "I remember we bought a pair of pink duvet covers from Brentford Nylons. And we were going to string them up from the studio roof and pretend to be God's testicles and talk about the world. Very sort of Waiting for Godot, really."
Inside Amy Schumer writer Dave Hanson previously wrote a showbusiness parody called Waiting For Waiting For Godot that premiered off-Broadway in 2013, about two understudies killing time as they wait to discover if they can get on stage in the play. A 2016 London transfer starred The Fast Show's Simon Day, James Marlowe and Laura Kirkman.
You can watch a 1991 news report on Edmondson and Mayall's Waiting For Godot here: