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As previously announced The Theatre Royal Haymarket is launching its next season with the production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot under the artistic directorship of Sean Mathias and staring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.  Waiting for Godot will tour the UK prior to its opening in London in April.  Designs are by Stephen Brimson Lewis and lighting is by Paul Pyant.  Waiting for Godot is produced by the Theatre Royal Haymarket Company in partnership with Duncan C. Weldon Productions Ltd. 

The show is set to tour to Milton Keynes Theatre on the 16^th – 21^st March 2009.  The Theatre Royal Haymarket is delighted to announce that as part of the Company’s commitment to involving young people and our close association with Masterclass (www.masterclass.org.uk) we will be offering the opportunity for two young individuals from the Milton Keynes area to take a featured role alongside the cast of Waiting for Godot. Ian and Patrick are looking forward to working in rehearsal with two boys at each venue on tour and we hope that this opportunity will provide an invaluable learning experience for two young aspiring actors. The Company is looking for two boys to play alternate performances and will be auditioning for the parts in open auditions on the 9 – 10^th December 2008. They will be playing the age of 10 years but the auditions will be open to boys up to 15 years of any ethnicity. DDay One of auditions will be Open Auditions and Day Two will be recalls for successful applicants from the first round. Every boy who is auditioning needs to be available for both of the auditions days, the dates of the performance in March and be on call for up to two weeks before opening night. For the successful boys rehearsals will take place the week before the production’s arrival at the venue. They will be conducted by Paul Warwick-Griffin, the assistant director for the production. Ian and Patrick will then rehearse with the boys on the Sunday afternoon before opening night on the Monday.  All boys that are interested in auditioning need to get an audition pack from the Milton Keynes Theatre by visiting www.trh.co.uk . In this there is a registration form which they need to fill in and return information about the audition and a piece of dialogue which they need to prepare. The open auditions will commence at 3pm with the last auditions being held at 7.30pm. Each boy will audition in a group of up to 20 and it will last for half an hour. All boys and their parents or guardians are warned that there could be long waiting times due to the numbers auditioning. Boys are allowed to turn up on the day if they haven’t registered though waiting times could be longer. Waiting for Godot follows two consecutive days in the lives of tramps, Vladimir (Patrick Stewart) and Estragon (Ian McKellen), who divert themselves by clowning around, joking and arguing, while waiting expectantly and unsuccessfully for the mysterious Godot.  Beckett’s Waiting for Godot exploded on to the London stage over 50 years ago when it shocked as many people as it delighted. Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, both renowned Shakespearean actors at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the West End and on Broadway, first worked together in Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977 and more recently in the X-Men films, as Magneto and Professor X.  Each of them has established their own iconic screen persona, as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and as Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard. Ian McKellen makes his Beckett debut as Estragon.  He will play alongside Patrick Stewart following their onscreen rivalry in the X-Men films.  McKellen has previously collaborated with Sean Mathias who has directed him as Uncle Vanya, the Captain in Dance of Death and as Widow Twankey twice.  Since he started acting in 1961, he has worked non-stop on stage and screen.  For the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Companies, McKellen has produced and acted in plays old and new, most recently on the RSC’s world tour as King Lear. He produced and wrote the screenplay for his Richard III and was nominated for an Oscar for Gods and Monsters and for Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings.  He recently played in Coronation Street and has just completed ITV’s remake of The Prisoner. Patrick Stewart is currently playing Claudius/Ghost in Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford before transferring to the Novello Theatre later this year.  Earlier this year he won an Evening Standard Award, a Critics’ Circle Award, a TMA Theatre Award, a Theatregoers’ Choice Award nomination, an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination, a Laurence Olivier Award nomination, and a Tony Award nomination for playing the title role in Rupert Goold’s Chichester Festival Theatre production of Macbeth which subsequently transferred to the West End and then Broadway.  His many other appearances for the RSC include The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra both in Stratford and at the Novello Theatre.  His other London theatre credits include A Life in The Theatre and The Masterbuilder and in New York his credits include Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Ride Down Mount Morgan and The Tempest.  Stewart performed his acclaimed, award winning one-man show, A Christmas Carol, both in the West End and on Broadway.  His many film and television credits include the X-Men films, Moby Dick, King of Texas and King Lear, as well as his role as Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek series.  Stewart was made an OBE in 2001.