There is a delicious moment in the Gate's revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot when the tramps Vladimir and Estragon remark that their blathering away to pass the time has been "going on now for half a century."

Waiting for Godot

Gate Theatre, Dublin

In a play that is in any case full of self-referential jokes, Johnny Murphy and Barry McGovern can be forgiven for making a subtle nod at history. Godot has indeed been expected for 50 years now, ever since the first Paris production on January 5th, 1953.

And in one sense this production by Walter Asmus marks the passage of the intervening decades all too forcefully. It is not that the play has dated or become irrelevant. But the shock and puzzlement have worn off. Who could have predicted in the 1950s that after half a century this once-weird play would become for the Gate what Juno and the Paycock was then for the Abbey: the fail-safe option to fill any hole in the repertoire? Asmus's Gate production, after all, has been on the go in one form or another now since 1988, though it started, if memory serves, with Tom Hickey as Vladimir and Barry McGovern as Estragon. McGovern, though, has been playing Vladimir even longer - since Ben Barnes's Irish Theatre Company production in 1982. What we have here is not a startling new event but a chance to re-acquaint ourselves with an old friend.

In a larger sense, too, this production raises the question of where Godot stands after 50 years. Asmus is in a direct line of apostolic succession from Beckett himself, whom he assisted on the famous 1975 Schiller Theatre production of Godot.

The Gate production is thus definitive, not just in Irish but in global terms. It is probably the closest we will ever get to the perfect, official Godot.

And it is a superb piece of work. The interplay between McGovern's Didi and Murphy's Gogo is by now so beautifully refined that it approaches the Beckettian ideal in which every movement, every gesture, every inflection, is just what it has to be and nothing more.

Alan Stanford's Pozzo gets better all the time, the blend of monstrous self-pity and sentimental cruelty now at its most potently repulsive. The addition, moreover, of Conor Lovett as Lucky is a further bonus, his inscrutable silences almost as spectacular as his one soaring monologue.

The way Rupert Murray's lighting fuses seamlessly with Louis le Brocquy's visual evocation of twilight is one of the outstanding achievements of Irish stage design. And Asmus's understanding of the way Beckett modulates the tone of the language is impeccable. The almost imperceptible shifts in mood, the way comedy and bleakness are simply different keys in which to play the same note, make this production a genuine classic.

And yet precisely because this is such a consummate achievement, it is also the best argument that the time has come to let the play off the leash. In this perfect official form, Godot is very obviously a great play that provides a terrific evening at the theatre. But it is not at all dangerous. Familiarity has bred, certainly not contempt, but a sense of comfort that Beckett himself could hardly have envisaged.

There is, for example, an incredibly obvious limitation in the play's claim to be a statement of the universal human condition. Its world is overwhelmingly a man's world.

All five of the on-stage characters (including the boy who brings the messages at the end of each act, played here by Fionn Curtis) and both of the off-stage presences (Godot and the boy's brother) are male. The sense that humanity has only one gender is so strong that when you hear Pozzo's famous speech that begins "They give birth astride a grave", you actually have to remind yourself who the "they" are.

There is also the problem that most western European audiences no longer have the sense of recently experienced horror that Beckett could assume in audiences that were just emerging from world war and the Holocaust. When Didi and Gogo use words like "corpses", "skeletons" and "charnel house"), they were not, in 1953, abstract terms.

What this means is that room must eventually be made for the kind of approaches that Beckett himself despised - the tramps being played by women, for example, or explicit references being made to the Holocaust. After 50 years, Beckett's ghost has been surely appeased by this classic production. If he is to continue to haunt the imagination of a new century, his grip must be loosened at last. - Fintan O'Toole

MedEia

Project, Dublin

From the arresting opening with ropes and paper screens evoking a ship in sail, Dood Paard theatre company's production is impressively assured. This Dutch collaborative group has taken the many versions of the myth of Medea, thrown them up in the air and lovingly reassembled the fragments. Three performers standing in a row recreate the familiar story of the princess from the Black Sea who falls in love with Jason, the hero of the Argo, uses her powers of sorcery to help him to find the Golden Fleece and then sails with him to Corinth. When Jason later rejects her in order to marry the king's daughter, Medea murders their two children, Jason's new bride and the bride's father. Oscar van Woensel and Kuno Bakker's text disconcertingly incorporates lyrics of pop songs, from the Beach Boys to Madonna, into the play's debate about love, betrayal, justice and responsibility.

Dood Paard's version, seen here as part of the Pan Pan International Theatre Symposium, dismantles the traditional form of Greek tragedy and brings the chorus to the forefront: the three performers narrate the terrible events, insisting that they cannot act to intervene, they can only describe and react, as passive consumers of information. "I am no human being," one of them says, "I am a voice of the chorus."

As the script shifts subtly from third- to first-person narration, from observation to enactment, they stand almost motionless. They express an extraordinary range of emotion, yet appear to be doing very little. As tension builds, and they tear down each paper screen in turn and advance to the front of the stage, we await a violent outburst. None comes; they exert absolute control to the end. This is a thought-provoking fusion of performance, writing and stagecraft, which succeeds in making Medea new. - Helen Meany

Dood Paard performs 40,000 Sublime and Beautiful Things tonight at Project Arts Centre, 8.30 p.m. and takes part in a free public event at Arthouse tomorrow at 5 p.m. Website: www.panpantheatre.com