Last year I wondered if Sir Ian McKellen felt let down by Sir Patrick Stewart. So brilliant was McKellen’s Estragon and so bland was Stewart’s Vladimir — now played by Roger Rees — any deep-down satisfaction McKellen might have felt about acting Stewart off the stage must have been tempered by the knowledge that when it comes to Beckett’s waiting tramps, it takes two to tango.
Or, in the case of Sean Mathias’s overwrought and over-designed (by Stephen Brimson Lewis) production, not so much tango as shuffle, soft-shoe style. This is the little dance the desolate duo break into during their curtain call, the final flourish in a production that unnecessarily highlights Vladimir and Estragon’s possible past as old-school music hall performers.
As the tramp with a plan, Rees finds depths not reached by Stewart. He is a morale officer whose reservoir of optimism has been reduced to dregs. Yet it is McKellen’s heartbreakingly bruised and bewildered Estragon that remains the stand-out performance here. A fine Matthew Kelly delivers a grotesque, Fatty Arbuckle of a Pozzo who torments his slave Lucky (a gaunt Ronald Pickup) beyond, it seems, the point of death. The point everyone is waiting for.
