The Everyman Palace Theatre reopens its doors to the public after refurbishments with the highly acclaimed Gate Theatre Production of Samuel Beckett's masterpiece Waiting for Godot. New seating in the auditorium will undoubtedly provide a luxurious quantity of padding for the buttocks and particularly at the edges. For Godot, however, the stark stage setting and the giddy prostrations of the protagonoists will undoubtedly sweep thoughts connected to the extremities clean out of the audience members' mind.

One could never accuse this play of being 'edge of the seat', but it does have highly sophisticated ways of making the audience uncomfortable. The trappedness that the two 'heroes' of the play, Vladimir and Estragon, convey to the audience is set up with Beckett's brilliant dialogue. A veritible web that many find as amazing to behold as the spider's and the reason why fifty-nine years after the writing of the play was completed, it still excites such interest and devotion. The Gate celebrates its 80th anniversary with a different anniversary. This year sees the twenty mark since the inaugural Gate production of Godot and they are bringing the show on a remarkable 32 counties, 40 venue tour that will last 8 weeks.

The production also sees the original cast from 1988 back on duty again for the cause and Beckett's one time assistant director on the famous Berlin Godot, Walter Asmus giving direction once again. The careers of all the cast members are inextricably linked with the works of Samuel Beckett. Barry McGovern, Johnny Murphy, Stephen Brennan and Alan Stanford are houshold names and have all worked on many Beckett productions. None more than Barry McGovern, who plays Vladimir in this production and has worked on many Beckett pieces, including I'll Go On, a one man show based on the novels Molloy and Malone Dies.

So it is understandable why this production is hailed as 'the definitive Waiting for Godot', by national and international press, yet McGovern would rather avoid such a comfortable niche for this production. Familiarity with the text and with the cast, in some ways make it difficult to keep the performances of the play vital.

"We always try to keep it fresh," McGovern muses, "and not have it as a museum piece because there's a great danger in a production that's been going for so long that it's just a museum piece from twenty years ago and we're just regurgitating the same old thing, however good or bad it may be." Ironically, it is this approach to Godot that has earned the production the 'definitive' tag. The cast, most of whom have worked with Beckett, along with the director of course, are highly atuned to his lingering influence on the play and that Beckett would undoubtedly rail against the idea that there should be such a thing as a 'definitive' version.

The years of working with Godot and the difficulty of playing such a verbose and complex part stand to McGovern in one way but in another offer just as difficult a challenge in attempting to stay fresh.

"We always try to approach it as if we're doing it for the first time, but God it's hard," McGovern acknowledges, "because when you're doing things literally thousands of times it's a lot of water under the bridge." Having done 294 performances of Godot to date and forty more to come on this tour, it becomes clear that the challenge is no trifle.