What next, the credit-crunch Godot with the tramps Vladimir and Estragon transformed into half-derelict British investors waiting for the title character but getting only a Pozzo who looks disconcertingly like Fred the Shred? Or two decaying pensioners confronted, not with God or whomever they imagine Godot to be, but with a grinning, clunking Gordon Brown? It’s one of the strengths of Beckett’s play, and one of the reasons a National Theatre poll proclaimed it the greatest dramatic work of the 20th Century, that it can be adapted to troubling circumstances galore. Yes, it’s the most universal of plays, but also often one of the most topical.

There was a famous production at San Quentin penitentary in California in 1957, a revival which was not only watched respectfully by prisoners who knew plenty about waiting but which eventually gave rise to a touring company of former inmates. There was a candlelit Godot directed by Susan Sontag in a Sarajevo surrounded by Serbian guns. The play was performed in Harlem, and then in flooded New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

I’ve seen a Palestinian Godot and I’ve seen a company called Efendi Productions set the play further east, with Pozzo a blimpish British imperialist. I’ve also seen the famous South African Godot, with John Kani as Vladimir and Winston Ntshona as a wounded, needy, touching Estragon.

Was that a distortion of the play? Rather an expansion. With an Afrikaaner Pozzo boasting about “my land” and “my slaves”, and tossing his chewed chicken bones to black tramps who warily use false names and deliver lines like “you’d make me laugh if it wasn’t prohibited” and “we’ve lost our rights . . . we gave them away” — a play that evoked the hopeless hopes of Everyman was also about waiting for deliverance from apartheid.

Yet the play is always also about a timeless frustration. Pozzo ends up saying it all: “One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second - they give birth astride of a grave, the light glimmers an instant, and then it’s night once more.”

The tramps may spend days, years, decades in impotent boredom, but in the big, baffling universe that’s their momentary habitat they might as well be maybugs. Life is a sort of interminable twinkling: the basic message of the playwright who looked so unblinkingly into the darkness and, starting with Waiting for Godot, reported what he saw and didn’t see with such fearlessness.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010