What's on in Brighton

Waiting for Godot

23 - 28 Mar 2009

Cost: £27-£42

Hours: 7.45pm; Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm

Sean Mathias directs Samuel Beckett's 20th-century classic Waiting for Godot at Brighton Theatre Royal, as part of a short UK tour before transferring direct to the West End. The play reunites Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as Estragon and Vladimir.

Set simply in a barren landscape with a tree, two fellows are hanging around, as they have done for ages, kicking their heels, chewing the fat and, of course, Waiting for Godot. At times bleak, at others comic, Beckett manages to encapsulate the human condition in all its contradictions in the interplay principally between Estragon and Vladimir, but also with the arrival on each day of Pozzo and his slave Lucky.

Beckett's play was written in the late 1940s and was first seen in Paris in 1953. Peter Hall's landmark British première followed two years later at the Arts Theatre Club, in Beckett's own English version, where he called the play "a tragicomedy in two acts," the tragedy being that Estragon and Vladimir's wait is completely in vain.

Two of Britain's top actors, McKellen and Stewart first worked together on stage over 30 years ago (in Tom Stoppard and André Previn's Every Good Boy Deserves Favours - recently revived at the National - in 1977 for the RSC). Subsequently they've been immortalised on celluloid in the X Men film franchise.

Sean Mathias has directed McKellen a number of times, including Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the National, Strindberg's Dance of Death (Australia, Broadway and West End) and as Widow Twankey in Aladdin at the Old Vic. Patrick Stewart recently stormed Chichester, the West End and Broadway in Rupert Goold's production of Macbeth, following which he played Claudius opposite David Tennant's Hamlet for the RSC.

This is Sean Mathias' first production as the new artistic director of the Theatre Royal Haymarket Company, following Jonathan Kent's 2007/2008 season, which comprised productions of The Country Wife, The Sea and Marguerite.