The performance that embarrassed Robin Williams: “We put our ass out and got kicked”
It’s hard to make categorical assessments of complete strangers, especially ones who are paid to transform into other people, but Robin Williams really didn’t seem like the type of guy who would be easily embarrassed. Looking like an idiot is an occupational hazard for comedians, even ones who are generational talents. Every standup has a story about bombing, whether it was to an audience of ten at the beginning of their careers or an audience of several million tuning in for Saturday Night Live.
Williams had a knack for doubling down, which is a skill that requires enormous confidence. If you tell a joke and it fails to evoke laughs, why would you keep pushing? You’d be more likely to want to sink into the floor than forge ahead. But Williams proved that the harder he went on a train of thought, the funnier it got. He could be riffing about the Falkland Islands, cats, or Shakespeare, and something still manages to strong-arm its way into making it sidesplittingly funny.
How, then, could this giant among humourists ever be embarrassed? It doesn’t seem possible. Well, it turns out that he stumbled exactly where a lot of other performers have: Beckett. Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as one of the most important playwrights of all time, which, if you know anything about pretentious theatre academics and how they use the word ‘important’, should set alarm bells ringing.
The Irish dramaturg was a confounding fellow known for his pioneering contributions to absurdism. One of his plays requires its actors to crouch in dustbins from start to finish. Another requires the actors to walk quickly in a very precise geometric pattern around a small stage while dressed in differently coloured robes.
His most famous work is Waiting for Godot, a deadpan (his plays were always deadpan) tragicomedy about two men who stand on an empty road in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a man named Godot, who never arrives. They discuss several disconnected topics, exhibit very little emotion, and decide that they’ll abandon waiting, though they never leave the stage.
There have been countless renditions of the play. Like Shakespeare, it invites wide-ranging interpretations. Is it a deeply existential tragedy? Is Godot supposed to be God? Is it about war? What do the bowler hats mean? Why is there a dead tree? Beckett himself had no interest in answering, so, not surprisingly, interpretations have been all over the place.
In 1988, director Mike Nichols offered his rendition in New York, starring Williams and Steve Martin in the lead roles. Being the virtuosic comedians they were, they opted for a lighter, more comedic tone rather than the usual nihilistic one. According to Williams, it was a disaster. When asked how it went, he said simply, “Painful. We put our ass out and got kicked for it.” It’s hardly surprising that he, one of the most famous improvisers of all time, took to ad-libbing lines some nights to try to rescue the sinking ship. Beckett fans were none too pleased.
“We played it as a comedy team, it wasn’t existential,” he continued. “Like these two guys from vaudeville who would go into routines that would fall apart into angst. Basically, it’s Laurel and Hardy.” Fans of Martin and Williams’s movies and standup routines would almost certainly have found Beckett’s play an impenetrable slog, while fans of the play would almost certainly have been affronted by the liberties that the comedians and Nichols took with the material. It was a lose/lose scenario, but they deserve some credit for trying.
