Whishaw and Lucian Msamati do well to fill the shoes of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart who last starred in the West End production 15 years ago

Paultons Square has been home to two Nobel Prize winners: dramatist Samuel Beckett, who lived there in 1934, and physicist Patrick Blackett from 1953 to 1969

James Macdonald captures the play’s emotional depth and its political power at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is directed by James Macdonald, starring Lucian Msamati as Estragon and Ben Whishaw as Vladimir with Tom Edden as Lucky and Jonathan Slinger as Pozzo.

Written in the late Forties, premiered in Paris in 1953 and London in 1955 (where it won Most Controversial Play at the first ever Evening Standard Theatre Awards), Godot established Beckett as a major writer and a stickler for the sanctity of his text and stage directions.

It’s almost seventy years since the 1955 premiere of Waiting for Godot in Britain, when it was greeted with boredom and incomprehension. Yet in this new production starring Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw as the two tramps Estragon and Vladimir, Samuel Beckett’s first masterpiece gleams more brightly than ever.

It is thrilling to have the opportunity to study this incomparable and mercurial actor live once again, after the underwhelming 'Bluets'