Sir Ian McKellen, better known as the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, is in Cape Town to perform in Waiting For Godot. Marianne Thamm spoke to him

'We could have gone to Broadway you know, to look for a Tony Award and made some money, but you know Sean ..." Sir Ian McKellen drawls playfully in that distinctive, resonant voice while gesturing at Sean Mathias, the play's director, seated opposite him.

Instead, after a two-year lifespan - including two box-office-busting West End seasons, performances across the UK and a season in New Zealand and Australia - this production of Waiting For Godot will play out its life in Cape Town at the newly opened Fugard Theatre from July 31 to August 14. On August 1 they will perform at the Oliver Tambo Sports Gymnasium in Khayelitsha on a pay-as-you-can basis.

It is, to put it mildly, a coup for the city.

"We had been asked to go to Los Angeles, Broadway, Toronto, various theatres in Europe, the Moscow Art Theatre and some of those offers were more complicated. Others were firm but we didn't want to take them," says Mathias.

"Ian was keen to go to New Zealand. He has a relationship with that country because Lord of the Rings was filmed there. Then I said 'if we are going to the Southern Hemisphere I'd really love us to go to Cape Town,'" explains Mathias.

Mathias, who was McKellen's lover for eight years and who continues to collaborate with him artistically, settled here in 1997.

At 71, McKellen still cuts an elegant and striking silhouette, regardless of the shaggy beard and long hair he has grown for his character, the tramp Estragon. This is a man somehow unselfconsciously aware of himself and his place as one of the world's greatest and most celebrated actors.

Mathias and McKellen have a long and "heartfelt" connection with South Africa. They first visited together in 1994 just after the elections - what Mathias said was "a sort of symbolic visit to thank the Market Theatre for sending their productions to England over the years".

McKellen, together with the late activist Simon Nkoli and lawyer Phumzile Mtetwa, met then President Nelson Mandela as part of the National Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Equality's attempts at getting the clause on "sexual orientation" included in the Constitution.

It is impossible to explain or assign meaning to Beckett's masterpiece, originally written in French in 1949 and translated into English in 1955. Essentially two tramps, Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi), are waiting for an appointment with a Mr Godot, who never pitches up. As they wait they bicker and play word games while other characters cross their paths.

"It cannot be pinned down. You can't say it is about this, it is about that, it is about something definitely. It is about a lot of things. It is about how we live," says McKellen.

Until this play, he adds, no one had noticed that "an awful lot of our lives are about waiting, no one had written it down, that we are all waiting, waiting for things to get better."

And while the play is described by Beckett as a "tragicomedy in two acts", the balance between comedy and tragedy keeps shifting. "We are doing a very pared-down, naturalistic version. You'd swear, if you watch Ian on stage, that he was born there," says Mathias.

McKellen, whose performance has been universally praised - "Masterly McKellen glitters in Waiting For Godot revival" wrote London's Evening Standard, for example - says he has lived with Estragon, the more needy of the two main protagonists, all his life.

"He has been inside me all along. That was Sean's gift to me. That I should be my Gogo. I should be the child that is in me. In the relationship he is basically the one who wants to be looked after and complains like a child if he is not. Estragon is me. I am not the one making the decision. I see the options but I can't make up my mind."

Roger Rees, a Tony and Olivier award-winning member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for 22 years, plays Vladimir; Olivier award-winner and UK television presenter Matthew Kelly plays Pozzo and Brendan O'Hea, who has acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre, plays Lucky.

South Africans Khathu Khangala and Hisham Ryklief, both 12, have been cast as the Boy.