Wait mates

IT’S been described as the theatre event of the year. Two of Britain’s greatest stage and screen actors, Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, are becoming the Laurel and Hardy of classical theatre in a revival of Waiting For Godot at Newcastle Theatre Royal.

With both men approaching 70 – McKellen reaches the landmark next month and Stewart is 69 this summer – there couldn’t be a better time for these luminaries of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Hollywood to play Samuel Beckett’s bowler-hatted bedfellows.

The text, over which academics have argued since 1953, seems to suggest the tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, have been together 50 years. But all the late Beckett confirmed was: “The only thing I’m sure of is that they’re wearing bowlers.”

Stewart says: “I will play Vladimir – a homeless man, waiting on a road beside a tree with his friend, Estragon, for a meeting with a man called Godot. I think the appeal is in its humour, its Morecambe and Wise badinage, its mystery and sense of peril and terror, but mostly in its towering humanity and love of mankind.”

For him its a dream role having first seen Waiting For Godot as a 17-year-drama student at Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre School, starring an unknown actor called Peter O’Toole.

“I think its power is perhaps greater now than in its first performances 50 years ago,”

says Stewart, who has strong links with the North-East because his father was born in Hebburn, near Jarrow.

McKellen, from across the other side of the Pennines, saw the play at around the same time and says: “When the National Theatre of Great Britain announced in its close-of-millennium poll that Waiting for Godot was the most significant English language play of the 20th Century I agreed.

After all, I was one of the voters.

“Waiting for Godot is the perfect job for me. I will play Estragon. I’ve never seen a great production… so it’s something high to aim for. I join up again with Sean Mathias, a director I admire and totally trust, and will be working with the great Patrick Stewart – X-Men trilogy’s Magneto and Professor X reunited on stage and disguised as a pair of wise-cracking tramps – fun in store,” he says.

The relationship between the two actors dates back to a first performance together with the RSC in 1977, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour with Stewart’s Soviet prison doctor tackling McKellen’s inmate, who was judged insane.

Perhaps the best-known thing about the play is that the elusive Godot never arrives, unlike the actors Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup who ensure the play has a quartet of real quality. Callow plays the brash Pozzo while Pickup is the mistreated servant, Lucky.

All four have stressed that Waiting For Godot – linked to the French slang words for boot, godillot or godasse by Beckett, who always regretted the close association with God – isn’t a daunting performance and can be understood from Beijing to Zimbabwe.

Stewart says: “If I have one fear it’s that people might be intimidated by the play’s reputation, or feel that they won’t understand it. It’s our responsibility to make sure that every moment will have clarity for the audience.”

McKellen is keen on the idea that the two characters could have been old theatrical chums. “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.”

While the two are going to enjoy several months of clowning around on stage, that hasn’t always been the case. Yorkshire-born Stewart’s career was solid, thanks to TV’s I Claudius, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. But it wasn’t until he went to the US to star as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, between 1987 and 1994, that Hollywood came calling.

Burnley lad McKellen had an even longer wait for international success. It took 1998 films Apt Pupil and Gods And Monsters to land him an X-Men role alongside Stewart before going on to play Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

It’s rumoured that both former RSC actors wanted the key role of King Lear which closed the company’s Complete Works Of Shakespeare season in 2007-2008.

McKellen got the nod, with Stewart settling for Prospero in The Tempest.

As a result, the two became rivals when McKellen’s Lear, which moved to the New London Theatre after playing Newcastle Theatre Royal, and Stewart’s Macbeth, at the Gielgud, were both nominated for Best Actor in last year’s Laurence Olivier Awards. Both lost to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello. Stewart then notched up his third Olivier win in the RSC role of Claudius opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet in the West End.

Initially, McKellen and Stewart were going to play opposite roles in Waiting For Godot but persuaded London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket’s new artistic director, Mathias, to change their characters.

McKellen says: “I realised Vladimire had a lot more to say and there would be more learning involved and I thought a younger man was up to that job.”

Stewart jokes back: “He hasn’t mentioned this, but he does fall asleep several times in the play. I get no sleeping done or, indeed, until the last page of the play do I sit down.”

But the final word on the play must go to McKellen: “It’s a masterpiece and resonates way beyond the limitations of its plot.”

■ Waiting For Godot, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Monday-Saturday. Sold out. Box Office returns: 08448-1