WE LAST saw Walter D. Asmus’s revival of Beckett’s most celebrated play at the Barbican in 1999, and here it is again, with every role, bar that of the boy who announces Godot’s non-arrival, played by the identical actor. It sounds as if these guys have been doing a lot of waiting at their home base, the Gate Theatre in Dublin. Waiting for April 2006, the centenary of the great fatalist’s birth.

If so, we are the gainers. Barry McGovern’s face may be more wrinkled and Johnny Murphy’s beard whiter, but their performances of (respectively) Vladimir and Estragon are more accomplished and no less fresh than seven years ago. Their give-and-take is more natural, sharper, funnier. You fully believe that they have spent 50 years together: bickering, playing old games, looking after each other, talking about separating, failing to separate, reminiscing, forgetting and, despite all, doggedly surviving.

They are also very different, as they should be. Murphy’s Estragon is the pessimist, a squat, lugubrious figure with a big, baffled face and an oversized jacket that gives him an oddly simian look. McGovern is the optimist, an eager, inquisitive man who bustles about the stage. Yet just when you think that he is a bit too upbeat, he gives you a blast of basic Beckett: “I can’t go on!!!”

The production, too, tends towards the droll rather than the dark. Maybe it could be harsher, tougher, grimmer. Yet Beckett himself advised his actors to keep the archetypal tramp-clown, Charlie Chaplin, in their minds. And when Stephen Brennan’s superb Lucky delivers his weird, fractured tirade, you cannot miss the play’s thrust.

Lucky is the ironically named slave brought on stage at the end of a rope by Alan Stanford’s Pozzo, the English-accented grandee who briefly diverts these very Irish hobos from their waiting game. Ordered to “think”, Brennan suddenly transforms himself from a bent, hobbling cripple into a blend of majestic-looking metaphysician and orotund evangelist, and turns a speech that can seem a crazed jumble into one of unmissable significance. Despite our hopes, moral pretensions, scientific advances — everything — humanity continues to “shrink and dwindle”, “waste and pine”. Even the smug, bullish Pozzo is left cramming his hat, his cloak, his camp-stool over his ears in an effort to avoid this truth.

For it is, of course, Beckett’s truth and the reason Waiting for Godot continues to exercise a hold unmatched by any other modern play. Who defined contemporary ennui and despair? The man born 100 years ago next Thursday.

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