Theater News

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart to Star in Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land on Broadway

Sean Mathias will direct America’s two favorite Brits in the Beckett and Pinter classics.

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in <i>Waiting for Godot</i>
Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot
(© Sasha Gusov)

Internationally acclaimed X-Men co-stars, Laurence Olivier Award-winning actors, and knights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are set to star in a limited season repertoire of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (which they previously performed at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2009) and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land on Broadway this fall. The theater, exact dates, and additional casting will be announced shortly. The pairing of plays will run in repertory.

Tony and Golden Globe Award winner Ian McKellen (The Hobbit) made his Broadway debut in Arbuzov’s The Promise in 1967 and won the Tony Award for his performance in Amadeus in 1981.

Drama Desk Award winner Patrick Stewart first appeared on Broadway in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1971. He is perhaps best known for his roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Designs for the productions include sets and costumes by Stephen Brimson Lewis (Indiscretions) and lighting by Tony Award winner Peter Kaczorowski (The Producers ).

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was last on Broadway in 2009, when Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane played the absurdist play’s absurd main characters Vladimir and Estragon in a Tony-nominated revival. In the drama, the pair spend an interminable amount of time waiting for the arrival of a person named Godot, who never arrives.

In No Man’s Land, which was hasn’t been on Broadway since a 1994 production starring Christopher Plummer, Pinter introduces two writers, Hirst and Spooner, and invites the audience to consider whether they really know each other or they are performing an elaborate charade.

If you simply cannot wait to experience the joy that is these two charmers together on stage, you can watch them in an impromptu curtain-call shuffle here: