@ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 10 Oct 2015

Opening the Lyceum‘s 50th season and artistic director Mark Thomson‘s final one with Waiting For Godot makes a lot of sense. If landmark anniversaries and career changes aren’t a time for indulging in existential rumination then when is? And in Brian Cox and Bill Paterson, Thomson has a duo with the pedigree and substance to put a distinctively Scottish stamp on Samuel Beckett‘s abstract classic. Then there’s the back story of Cox being in the original Lyceum company. The logic behind the production is compelling.

It’s also just bold enough a choice. The meandering and oblique musings of two old men, Vladimir and Estragon, as they wait for a man that never arrives, it’s not an obvious crowd-pleaser, but Godot’s canonical status and “local boys” cast should mean it meets commercial as well as artistic objectives.

Cox and Paterson do make an excellent pairing – distinguished Scottish actors of a certain age, presumably very pleased at this opportunity to take these iconic roles. Cox is the more cartoonish of the duo. His waddling Didi, with his overexaggerated facial expressions, has something of the silent movies about it. His voice doesn’t. The big man’s a little too booming in places, over-egging the pudding. Paterson’s performance is finer grained, and a smoother watch. John Bett and Benny Young ably support as Pozzo and Lucky, the two equally esoteric characters who stumble across the main protagonists.

But as one would expect it’s the interplay between Cox and Paterson which defines the production, and true enough, aside from the usually mute Lucky’s key (and only) speech in Act One, it’s their scenes that linger in the mind, whether the interaction is physical (hat-swapping, dancing, aimlessly roaming the stage) or verbal (the endless debating and waiting). They are playful, confident and fluid.

Visually, it’s immediately beautiful. The set is one giant, white, optical illusion. Angles and gradients transform the stage into something vast, trapping the characters in what Estragon calls “void”. Aside from the central tree, used for various devices both literal and metaphorical, our men are abandoned in depthless, icy tundra. When they are upstage, they appear dwarfed and stuck and doomed, like spiders in a bathtub. When Lucky is delivering his speech downstage, the set frames the characters perfectly, artistically, like a weird Guinness ad from the 80s.

You take what meaning you can from this play, and there’s no obvious steering on Thomson’s part towards any particular interpretation, other than presenting it in as attractive and polished a form as possible. At this time, and in this context, it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been better done.