Posted on 04/01/2009 3:06:01 PM PDT by nickcarraway
It's a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical event: Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are on stage together in Waiting For Godot. They discuss how this casting to die for came about.
The prospect of seeing Sir Ian McKellen, the pre-eminent male classical actor of his generation, treading the boards again is in itself enough to warrant a box-office stampede. The prospect of seeing him star in Waiting for Godot opposite Patrick Stewart, who is fast catching up with him in the theatrical titan stakes after a long sojourn in LA playing Capt Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, is a once-in-a-lifetime excitement.
Literally so, since – aside from briefly appearing in the 1977 premiere of Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour – the pair haven't worked together on stage, and neither has appeared in a Beckett play before. On screen, it's a different matter: they've played arch-rivals Professor Charles Xavier (Stewart) and Magneto (McKellen) in the X-Men trilogy. Once you factor in each star's additional global following for Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings respectively, the stage is set for the must-see theatrical event of the spring season.
Instead of heading straight into the West End, though, the Godot company – which includes Ronald Pickup and Simon Callow – has undertaken a regional tour prior to its residency at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. In a tapas bar in Milton Keynes, an hour before curtain-up, I caught up with these two grand old men of British theatre – Stewart is 68, McKellen turns 70 in May – to talk about tramping around in Godot and how they bonded in a Hollywood trailer.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I was just thinking “What a waste of good actors!” when I saw the headline.
Patrick Stewart has done “King Lear” for TV. I’ve been meaning to look for it at the library.
Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, 'waiting for Godot'
Nah, their best work together was as gay ex-lovers Magneto and Professor Xavier in the X-Men movies.
I googled “Waiting for Godot,” I’d rather have nails pounded into my hands and feet than sit through it.
“Waiting for Gay-dot”?
I do like Stewards stuff in general. He did a great Sejanus in I Claudius. I liked his Capt. Picard.
I hate Godot.
McKellan is a bone smuggler....I hear Steward is not.
McKellen once asked Stewart if he could see his Picard....
...it was an uncomfortable gay moment
I feel old suddenly.
Who says gays are more fashion-savvy?
Looks like McKellen shaved for the part.
I liked to read Godot. I actually thought that the message was if your waiting for a miracle to fix what is wrong then you’ll wait forever. Get off your butt and stop wickedness instead of watching it unfold. But I suppose I took a different message from the work than most people.
That's a pretty good post-modern reading of the play. People nowadays don't make a display of modern despair, but tend more to accept the world as it is.
The intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s were a pretty depressed lot, though, and they took the message to be existential despair in a godless world.
But Bert Lahr was in the New York cast, and he probably wasn't trying to convey existential despair. Here's the original New York Times review:
... Since "Waiting for Godot" has no simple meaning, one seizes on Mr. Beckett's experience of two worlds to account for his style and point of view. The point of view suggests Sartre--bleak, dark, disgusted. The style suggests Joyce--pungent and fabulous. Put the two together and you have some notion of Mr. Beckett's acrid cartoon of the story of mankind. ...
I know I’ve seen at least parts of his King Lear, but you know how it was with old, broadcast TV ... you go to the bathroom, and then someone spills something in the kitchen, and the next thing you know, you missed half of it. What did people do before VCRs?
I’ll have to check the library for the “Hamlet.” I didn’t like Kenneth Branagh’s film a bit, in spite of its having every living great actor in it.
We studied “Waiting for Godot” in high school, too, and felt very absurdist, I’m sure ... but basically, it’s BO-RING.
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