Star rating: ****
The shadow of a tree cast on the big, billowing sail of a stage curtain that presages Guy Hollands's new main-stage production of Samuel Beckett's extended existentialist vaudeville drama speaks volumes about what follows. The swirly-whirly fairground organ waltz confirms it, and by the time we're left alone with a pair of neatly laid-out tacketty boots sitting before the sort of red velvet drapes that fall on tributes to dead comedians, we know we've been witness to some kind of showbiz heaven.

As Vladimir and Estragon, the two old gents terminally waiting for their man in some slow-burning limbo, Gerry Mulgrew and Kevin McMonagle spark off each other with the sort of pronounced gallus patter that lays bare their co-dependence as a set of painfully familiar routines, with the only punchline the prospect of death. Their cheeky winks to the audience on a circular floorboard set infront of an ink-black background means this ultimate double-act never loses sight of its own artifice, Vladimir's prostate problem and all. The pair's brief moments alone are telling. The play opens with Estragon struggling in agony with the boots that confine him. Later, Vladimir's song plays up the solitariness required for creativity beyond that pain.

As their counterpoints, James Ryland's Pozzo is a John Bullish figure, while Keith MacPherson's Lucky spews out philosophy like an eccentric academic. Like a latter-day sketch show, though, Beckett's running gags are repeated, then stretched and subverted beyond what initially looks like throwaway one-liners. So where in Act One Pozzo and Lucky's master/servant, straight-man/funny presence is even more marked, by Act Two, one is blind, the other without voice, two more casualties lost in the wilderness.