McKellen and Stewart Will Bring Pinter and Beckett to Broadway in the Fall

Jeff Christensen/Associated Press Patrick Stewart, left, with Ian McKellen in 2006.

The theater and film stars Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, known for their chemistry in the “X-Men” films as friends-turned-foes Magneto and Professor Xavier, will return to Broadway together in the fall for an unusual two-play repertory of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the producers announced on Thursday.

Directed by a fellow Englishman, Sean Mathias, the two plays - both bleakly funny existential classics by Nobel Prize-wining writers â€" will run in rotation, sometimes on adjacent nights and possibly on the same days as matinee and evening performances. Suchrepertory schedules are fairly common in British theater but rare on Broadway; the three-play cycle of “The Norman Conquests” played in repertory in 2009 and the three parts of “Coast of Utopia” ran during the 2006-07 season, but those productions mostly featured actors sticking to the same roles.

By contrast, Mr. Stewart will play Vladimir in “Godot” and Hirst in “No Man’s Land” while Mr. McKellen will play opposite him as Estragon in “Godot” and Spooner in “No Man’s Land.” Additional casting for the plays will be announced later, as will the performance dates and theater.

Mr. Stewart was last on Broadway in 2010 in a critically drubbed production of “A Life in the Theater,” and prior to that in 2008 as the lead in “Macbeth,” for which he earned a Tony nomination. The plays mark the first time Mr. McKellen will be back on Broadway since “Dance of Death” during the 2001-2 season; he won a Tony Award for best actor in a play in 1981 for “Amadeus.”

Mr. Mathias, a Tony nominee in 1995 for “Indiscretions,” directed Mr. Stewart and Mr. McKellen in their roles in “Godot” in a London producton in 2009. The three men will prepare “No Man’s Land” this summer with a try-out production to be announced later.

“Godot” was last on Broadway in 2009 starring Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane, while “No Man’s Land” last ran in 1994 with Jason Robards and Christopher Plummer. Mr. Mathias, in a statement on Thursday, described the plays as natural companions.

“In ‘Waiting For Godot,’ two men exist in a universe that is both real and imagined - a place where time does not always advance towards a future. And as the two men wait, two outsiders enter to disrupt that universe,” he said. “In ‘No Man’s Land,’ two men inhabit a land that is neither here nor there - a land where time and memory play unreliable tricks. And as these two men converse, two other men who are both familiar and unfamiliar enter this same land with unnerving effect.”

The plays will be produced by Stuart Thompson (the current Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) and NOMAN! GO Produc! tions, a consortium of British and American investors assembled for these plays.