When Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot exploded on to the London stage 50 years ago, it shocked as many people as it delighted. There had never been a play like it. Two tramps clowning around, joking and arguing, repeating themselves, as they wait through one day and then another, waiting for the mysterious Godot. The combination of music hall, poetry and tension redefined what is possible in theatre, so that these days Waiting for Godot is accepted as one of the most significant plays of the 20th century. Beckett’s characters have lost none of their power to fascinate and amuse and this production, directed by the acclaimed theatre and film director, Sean Mathias, has attracted the sort of great actors that the play deserves.

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are both renowned Shakespearean actors at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the West End and on Broadway. They first worked together in Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977 and more recently in the X-Men film trilogy, as Magneto and Professor X. Each of them has established their own iconic screen persona, as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and as Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard.