In 2009 the same team – director Sean Mathias and acting knights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart – were responsible for an almost universally lauded Waiting For Godot in the West End. It later transferred to Broadway, in repertoire with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1975); now, the latter production has travelled back across the Atlantic, and berths in London after a UK tour.

I was one of the few dissidents regarding Godot, and in particular regarding Stewart. Here, however, I have no such reservations. As Hirst, a successful man of letters, he exudes the kind of restraint which implies immense power in reserve, yet is also when occasion demands vain, rumbling or even elegiac, evoking at various moments Shakespeare’s Lear and Beckett’s Krapp. He meshes beautifully with McKellen as Spooner, his down-at-heel guest. This Spooner, with his CND lapel badge and rudimentary tuft of a silver ponytail, is ruefully, chucklingly aware of his straitened circumstances. The pair insert a number of discreet grace notes: when Spooner reminisces of a third party, “How bald he was!”, McKellen casts a sidelong glance at Stewart, and at what after St Paul’s is the most famous dome currently in London. They graduate the increasing sozzlement of the first act finely, and slip with equal assurance into what seem to be both the same and entirely different characters the morning after.

As Hirst’s minions, Owen Teale growls and looms most Pinteresquely as Briggs (this is, after all, the man who killed Jon Snow in Game Of Thrones), and if Damien Molony’s Foster is superficially cheerier, he can also twirl a coffee-maker’s power cable like a thuggish Roger Daltrey. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s formal yet alienating set is surmounted by a forestscape, as if to suggest a wilderness similar to that of the title in which each man finds himself.

I was still a child when the première production of No Man’s Land with Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud transferred to this theatre from the National in 1975; I do, however, remember Pinter himself appearing as Hirst opposite Paul Eddington in 1992-3. That production was, I averred, “One to tell your grandchildren about”; this one fits comfortably into the same sentence.

Written for the Financial Times.