Waiting for Godot *** (unedited)

X-Men veterans Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen make an impressive double act in this music-hall influenced revival of Beckett’s existentialist tragi-comedy in which, as someone famously quipped, “nothing happens, twice.” Their smelly-footed Estragon and weak-bladdered Vladimir are a pair of down-and-out vaudevillians whose interdependency has evolved through half a century of friendship. Whilst they pass the time waiting for the ever absent Godot, they munch carrots, contemplate suicide, and cross paths with Simon Callow’s bombastic Pozzo and Ronald Pickup’s Lucky, a human packhorse with a rope round his neck. Director Sean Mathias has added comic sound effects and a crumbling theatre set, but it’s McKellen’s poignant performance as a doddery, bewildered Estragon which provides the bleak humanity at the core of this 1950’s classic.

Louise Kingsley