Samuel Beckett’s baffling, uncertain masterpiece is as resonant in a time when the foundations of our economy are shaking beneath us as it was on its debut more than five decades ago.

In the Theatre Royal’s landmark event of its season, Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are taking the roles of the homeless, aged Estragon and Vladimir. The touring production – possibly the most star- studded in its history – will then make its way with supporting actors Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup to the West End.

For Stewart, playing Vladimir in Beckett’s play, polled as the most significant theatrical work in English of the 20th century by the National Theatre, is the realisation of an ambition that first took hold more than 50 years ago. Then a drama student at Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre School, the 17-year-old Stewart saw a relatively unknown Peter O’Toole perform in the same role.

“When he came on stage, my sense was that the lights brightened,” says Stewart during a mid-morning rehearsal break in Southwark.

McKellen, one of the voters who placed Godot at the top of the National Theatre poll, was similarly captivated by a piece he found “infuriating and astounding by turns” when he saw it in Manchester.

Rumours the pair were to reunite on stage were circulating for months before the official announce-ment; hardly surprising, given the screen reputation of the much-admired actors, who first met in the mid-1970s when they were leading lights in the Royal Shakespeare Company ensemble (although they shared the stage only once, in Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves A Favour in 1977).

Since then, Stewart has become best known for his 15 years as the unflappable Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation on the small and big screens, while McKellen became nothing short of a household name for his role as Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

In 2000, the pair were cast as sworn enemies in the first X-Men film, a smash at the box office that prompted Stewart and McKellen to return to their roles as benevolent psychic headmaster Professor Xavier and mutant terrorist Magneto for two sequels.

With the final X-Men film and their antagonistic on-screen relationship behind them, along with a new round of critically acclaimed stage performances for each of them, the pair now play close but argumentative pals in Beckett’s play. Over the course of a story famously described as one in which “nothing happens, twice”, they bicker, contemplate suicide and try to alleviate the boredom as they wait for their rendezvous with the mysterious Godot.

“They need each other to stay alive,” says Stewart, adding that he, McKellen and the production’s director Sean Mathias interpreted numerous clues in the text they believe point to Vladimir and Estragon’s past as a long-standing performing double act.

“We landed enthusiastically on the idea that a good starting point, and maybe finishing point, is to make theirs a theatre relationship,” says McKellen.

“They say things like ‘Oh, my feet are hurting – will you help me to take my boots off?’, which is the kind of conversation that could happen between people sharing a dressing room. Audiences could imagine that Patrick and I have spent our lives being in plays together. We’ve had very similar careers and clearly like the same sorts of plays. Those members of the Godot audience who’ve just seen us separately in Shakespeare productions will, I hope, find it fun that these two guys are now in a Beckett play, wearing baggy trousers and bowler hats.”

McKellen will be 70 in two months’ time, while Stewart turns 69 in the summer, making them, in McKellen’s words “the ideal age” for the parts.

“We’re still active but, like Vladimir and Estragon, we know about aches and pains,” he says.

“Ian and I are both Northerners, separated only by the Pennines [McKellen grew up in Lancashire and Stewart in Yorkshire], and I think there’s another element there which gives us a shared understanding for the play,” Stewart adds.

First premiered in 1955, Godot was an instant critical success, prompting the Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson to call it “the most unforgettable and important” night of his theatre-going life. It has since been staged in more than 100 countries, including South Africa, where the seemingly interminable wait for Godot became a cipher for the years of hardship under apartheid, and a staging in the besieged Sarajevo while that city waited for intervention as the bombardments continued.

The play has been subject to countless permutations and interpretations, but it is this indirectness, this open-ended and sometimes infuriating ambiguity that has allowed it so many revivals. As the financial certainties many had taken for granted crumble beneath our feet, the timing for this production – and another which recently opened on Broadway with Nathan Lane – couldn’t be more apt.

The perceived difficulty of Beckett’s text, which has induced untold headaches in A-level classrooms over the years, is Stewart’s only concern about this touring production.

“If I have one fear,” he says, “it’s that people might be intimidated by the play’s reputation, or feel they won’t understand it. But there is nothing difficult about this play and it’s our respon-sibility to make sure every moment will have clarity for the audience.”

Godot, he contin-ues, is not only filled with physical and verbal comedy, but is also deeply touching. He says Vladimir’s tender concern for Estragon’s welfare is particularly moving. “Several weeks into rehearsal, there are sections I cannot read without getting upset.”

In both acts of the play, Vladimir and Estragon are joined by the brash Pozzo – played by Theatre Royal patron Simon Callow – and his downtrodden servant Lucky (Ronald Pickup).

A familiar face from films such as A Room With A View, Four Weddings And A Funeral and Shakespeare In Love, Callow has known McKellen for more than 30 years and Stewart for ten, and is equally aware of the impenetrability of Beckett’s text.

“It’s a difficult play but the audiences are always surprised by how much they laugh,” he says.

“It’s a very, very funny play. Ian and Patrick wanted to do it and I salute them for that – they could have chosen something much, much easier.”

He says Beckett was writing about the lives of modern people “who often find themselves in a void and who don’t know what they’re doing”, and says the play’s sense of purposelessness is as applicable to today’s situation as any other.

“I don’t think any time is not uncertain,” he says. “I found the big explosion of affluence we’ve just been through very unsettling.

I knew it couldn’t last. It was completely phoney and one didn’t understand how billions that weren’t there before were created out of thin air. I’m old enough to remember ration books and a time when people lived on the most meagre amount. Then to see junior bankers spending £4,000 on a wine bill, you just thought, ‘That cannot be right. It must be a con’.”

A friend of Callow’s toured in a student production in Ireland (the country of Beckett’s birth). “He told me that ‘we absolutely didn’t know what the play was about. But we found, if we just followed the rhythm of the dialogue, then in the audience there would be great laughter, followed by tears, almost systematically, throughout the performance.’”

Ronald Pickup – who joined the National Theatre Company on the same day as McKellen in 1965 – has a unique perspective on the play within the cast in that he worked with Beckett in the 1970s, and read from one of his novels at the writer’s memorial service after his death in 1989.

“In Godot,” he says, “Beckett has thrown everything into the emotional pot. He keeps wrong- footing you, as actor and audience.”

He says many of the critical interpretations and theories surrounding the play “would have made Beckett laugh when he was alive and I’m sure he’s laughing now. The enigma that’s embedded in this play has allowed scholars to have a field day. That’s not knocking them – but it explains why Godot can be played in Beijing or Zimbabwe or here.

It’s extraordinary how the same thing has kept on hitting all of us in rehearsal. The play is so accessible, so wonderfully psychologically apposite for any member of an audience.”

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