McKellen & Stewart Team up to Wait for Godot???

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart have gone head-to-head in The X-Men and in the Best Actor competition in this year’s Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers’ Choice Awards (which McKellen eventually won for King Lear), but the thespian titans may soon join forces on stage. According to today’s Daily Mail, the two sixty-somethings are in advanced talks to co-star in a new West End revival of Samuel Beckett’s 1955 classic Waiting for Godot.

If all goes to plan, the production, directed by Sean Mathias, would open at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the new year, following the three-show in-house season of work programmed by Jonathan Kent, the final production of which, Michel Legrand musical Marguerite, opened last week (See WOS TV, 21 May 2008).

In Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting on a deserted road. As they pass the time, they ask the question: “Will Mr Godot ever come?”. In the National Theatre’s NT2000 poll, theatre professionals voted Waiting for Godot the most significant English language play of the 20th century. The play’s last West End outing was Peter Hall’s 50th anniversary production, which transferred in 2006 to the Arts Theatre (See 1st Night Photos, 10 Oct 2006), where Hall directed the English-language world premiere in 1955 when he was the theatre’s 25-year-old artistic director.