TWO acclaimed actors will appear in key roles in Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece about death and mortality.

The Endgame will be staged at Manchester's HOME from February 25 to March 12.

Coronation Street actors David Neilson (Roy Cropper) and Chris Gascoyne (Peter Barlow) star in a co-production between HOME and the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow

The dark comedy is classic Beckett which finds laughter in the darkness in an absurd and macabre play which, melding tragedy and comedy, makes a grim joke of life.

Languishing between life and death, the chair-bound tyrant Hamm (Neilson) and his dutiful but resentful servant/companion Clov (Gascoyne) are irrevocably bound to one another. They pass their days in a filthy bare room, caught in a futile loop of pointless routines. Their endless and brutal verbal jousting match is punctured only by the nostalgic reminiscing of Hamm’s crippled parents, Nagg and Nell, reduced to living in rubbish bins.

One of the unspoken themes in the play is that having someone else around, even an irritant, can help to assuage the pain. But Hamm and Clov’s unwillingness to face this pain alone somehow makes the pain greater, and their complementary, dominant-submissive pairing - a staple of Beckett’s plays - highlights their numbing dependency. Beckett compared Hamm and Clov’s tense co-dependency to his own relationship with his wife in the 1950s; both wanted to leave the other, but were afraid to face life alone.

Neilson said: “Chris and I have wanted to do Endgame for quite a while. We are both very excited to be working with Dominic Hill as we really enjoyed his recent productions at the Citizens.

Gascoyne who played Peter Barlow in Coronation Street for 15 years until 2014, said: “I have had a strange obsession with the works of Beckett since I was a young actor studying at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama some 25 years ago.

"So I feel very privileged to be given this rare opportunity to perform in one his greatest plays alongside my friend and fellow actor David."

Tickets for Endgame at HOME are on sale now at http://homemcr.org/production/endgame