Andrew Upton’s production of Beckett’s famous play, staring Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh, wows London critics.

Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh have wowed London critics in Andrew Upton’s highly lauded staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The Sydney Theatre Company production, which first seduced Australian critics and audiences alike in 2013, was presented at the Barbican Centre earlier this week as the headline event of the famous London venue’s major retrospective of the revered Irish playwrights work.

Jane Shilling of the The Telegraph declared the STC’s staging a production of “luminous intelligence and virtuoso physicality,” describing Roxburgh and Weaving’s performances as “revelatory.” Chief theatre critic for The Guardian Lyn Gardner was equally gushing in her praise for the show saying, “This is an evening that is clear, intelligent and boasts real chemistry between Weaving and Roxburgh,” although the three star rating that accompanied the review seemed out of step with the positivity of her words.

Sydney Theatre Company Artistic Director Andrew Upton

Ian Shuttleworth’s four star review for The Financial Times praised the paring of Roxburgh and Weaving, and the “complimentary-through-difference which Andrew Upton and his cast bring out,” in the contrasting accents and behaviours of the two central protagonists. Fiona Mountford of The Evening Standard – the highest circulating paper in the UK – also applauded Upton’s casting, saying “Weaving and Roxburgh are a felicitous partnership, at ease and sparking off each other. Weaving revelling in Beckett’s spare and surprisingly witty language, has a delightfully rumpled grandeur, while the equally excellent Roxborugh bursts with a more impatient pragmatism.”

Upton, Weaving, Roxburgh and the rest of the talented cast of the STC production should be feeling exceptionally proud of the largely glowing critical response this week, given the unavoidable comparisons to the Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan led production of Waiting for Godot, premiered in 2009 in London, before touring across the world, including a season on Broadway, in recent years. Given the laurels earned by the STC staging, it seems entirely likely that the combination of Roxburgh and Weaving will be viewed as the new definitive account of Beckett’s most well-known play.