"Deuteronomy". BT Studio

Deuteronomy is the last of the Five Books of Moses. It’s the one that repeats a lot of the things that were said in the second, third and fourth books. In fact it’s known in Hebrew as Mishneh Torah, Repetition of the Law. But rather than simply telling the stories, it delves into motivation and self-analysis. So it’s the ideal title for a play that features two characters who analyse themselves, their purpose, and their language repetitively without ever truly getting anywhere new.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Deuteronomy is a true, unabashed, full-on absurdist production. It’s an open love-letter to Waiting for Godot, and – against all the odds – it’s a very good one too.

The parallels are almost embarrassingly obvious. The characters are two tramps, sitting and talking through a sequence of half-comic routines in an alienated wasteland. One of them comes on dragging a large coffin behind him. They talk about leaving, but they never do. If Samuel Beckett was still alive, he might have had a word with his lawyers. But if he’d come and watched the play I think he would have gone away quietly chuffed. Because it’s not a plagiarism of his work. It takes his scenario, and fills it with different, but suitable, ideas and conceits. It’s the DVD extras of Waiting for Godot.

You may like that or you may not. But – like the other play in the BT this week, Punk – Deuteronomy makes no apology for what it is. It wears its absurdism proudly on its sleeve.

Even more than Estragon and Vladimir (In Beckett’s original), ‘The Man’ and ‘The Beggar’ are obsessed with language and its contortions. They point out syllogisms, penmanship, rhetoric, and challenge each other to ‘decontextualise in a sentence’. They’re like two wordsmiths having a bit of rest and relaxation at the back of their own imaginations. In the context of their airy debate, the play’s non-location, in a nameless wilderness, feels meaningful: they’ve essentially stepped out of reality onto a purely intellectual plane, where thoughts and words flit around, posing as civilisation. (You know, like Godot.)

But there are two essential ingredients of Deuteronomy that raise it above pale imitation. One is the utter enthusiasm of Charlie Thurston’s writing. Thurston clearly knows and loves absurd theatre, and even if its heyday was in the 1950s, why on earth should he not recreate it in the 2020s, if he knows what he’s doing? In the 1770s Richard Brinsley Sheridan revived Restoration Comedy ninety years after it had swept the stages of London. And there’s room for more than one Godot in the world.

The other vital components in the show’s success are the performances of Freddie and Jo (the programme doesn’t tell us their surnames) as The Beggar and The Man. Neither outdoes the other, and both are superb: animated, passionate, self-doubting and proudly entertaining. The Man has a monologue about his own petty achievements in life towards the end, and it is both moving and uplifting.

The one image that overrides all others in the play is the apple. Appropriately this brings in the remaining Book of Moses, Genesis, and subtly channels the characters’ debate towards the knowledge of good and evil, the loss of innocence and the search for wisdom. ‘Teach a man to think, he’ll be mad within a day’, says The Beggar, and his curmudgeonly philosophising sounds almost comfortingly old-fashioned.

I do have to make one negative comment. In the marketing material for Deuteronomy on the Oxford Playhouse website, they quote a positive review by broadcaster Kate Copstick, and also give the persuasive impression that it had a ‘standout run’ at the Edinburgh Festival last year. That review and Edinburgh run were actually for a different show by the same company. Come on, guys, you don’t need to do that. Honesty is the best policy.

But to finish on a high note, a word about the standard of production in this play: it was great to see a superbly well-made prop (the coffin) that wasn’t just rented from TAFF’s stores but clearly purpose-made for the show. This was matched by the lighting, which shifted subtly from afternoon to evening over the course of the performance, while birds and crickets added simple but effective atmosphere. Classy.