For very many viewers, the triumph of the recent Beckett on Film project was Atom Egoyan's masterful film of Krapp's Last Tape, which responds with intelligence and cinematic flair to one of the most daunting challenges in filming the Beckett canon: that of tackling a play which features just a single character on the same set for more than an hour, some of which is completely silent.
Egoyan's film records a magnificent, deeply immersed performance from John Hurt as the world-weary Krapp, a man riddled with regret and self-loathing as he spends his 69th birthday playing back a tape of his thoughts from 30 years earlier - when he sounded so much younger and idealistic and life seemed to offer so many possibilities. As the unobtrusive camerawork lays bare the man's emotional frailty so vividly expressed in Hurt's performance, many of the audience, like Krapp, will shed tears before it ends.
Hurt first performed the play two years ago at the Barbican in London 1999 - to such rave reviews that it was brought back early last year for a seven-week season at the New Ambassadors in London, after which Egoyan directed the film version at Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co Wicklow. Hurt, the versatile 61-year-old English actor who has been living in Ireland for 10 years, will play Krapp for the first time on the Irish stage when he returns to the role at the Gate Theatre in Dublin next week, performing two shows a night for three weeks.
"I'm absolutely certain it's a different experience in the theatre," Hurt commented when we met at the end of rehearsals.
"Beckett wrote it for the theatre. I might understand the film better in 10 years' time. I often find that with films. You cannot have an objective understanding of a film you're in until much later on, when you've forgotten any of the circumstances under which it was filmed. There are some of my films which I have never seen."
Such as? He hums and smiles as he ponders the question. "I don't think they're very significant films, I have to say. Perhaps they were ones I didn't particularly want to see."
Maybe the laboured Mel Brooks sci-fi spoof, Spaceballs? "No, I saw that," he says. "At least I think I saw that. Maybe I saw some of it. But I certainly saw the first Mel Brooks film I did." This was History of the World Part I - in which John Hurt played Jesus.
"It was very funny. Actually, I think it was funnier on the set than it was in the film. There were great lines, like [in the Last Supper scene] Leonardo coming up and saying: 'Everyone who wants to be in the picture, get to the other side of the table.' And 'Are you all together, or do you want separate chairs?'."
Whenever he has visitors at his Co Wicklow home and they ask to see some of his work, he is most likely to produce a videotape of the 1987 series The Storyteller, in which he is the linking title character. "They're short films, and everyone seems to like them, whether they're children or grown-ups," he says. "There were nine stories, all taken from Grimm's anthology of fairytales, brilliantly done by Jim Henson with some very good animatronics. Some of the stories I'm in, in some I'm just the storyteller."
The series was written by Anthony Minghella, who went on to direct the Oscar-winning The English Patient. "He wrote the whole series, and his scripts were just staggering," says Hurt with a palpable enthusiasm.
"Minghella proves my theory about reality and performing in the theatre or in the cinema - that if there is an equation, then style equals reality. If you get the style right, it will automatically be real, insofar as you can be real. Anthony got the style so right that it immediately became real, and that's the secret of good storytelling."
Krapp's Last Tape, he believes, "has an extraordinary life of its own. I still can't put my finger on it exactly. I didn't treat it as Beckett at all. I treated it as what I read. He does put certain restrictions on you, but they make sense. It's interesting that the version we use is not the one you buy in the shops, because that has all sorts of things, like keys to the drawers, which Beckett dropped after he directed it himself. He remodelled it slightly, taking out certain complications which were merely underlining what he was saying already. When he directed it, he realised that Krapp didn't need keys, for example.
"The fact that the bananas are in the drawer is deceit enough for Krapp.
"He's not supposed to eat them, so he hides them and he doesn't remember if he's put them in or not, or that he's put two in there. Or maybe he does remember, and he likes to deceive himself because he's on his own.
"The whole piece is about being on your own in every possible way. It's a life that he has chosen, to be on his own, and we discover that he suffers deeply because he is on his own. And he does things you would never do unless you were on your own. Like when he puts a banana in his mouth. It's a ritual he goes through - and if he thought anyone was watching him, he would be devastated because he knows he shouldn't do it. He's like a naughty boy because he knows bananas make him ill."
Hurt recalls seeing the young Albert Finney in the play at Chichester in the last 1960s, and seeing Patrick Magee perform it on television. The play, which was published and staged for the first time in 1956, was written for Magee. In fact, Beckett began writing it under the title, The Magee Monologue.
"It was inspired by Magee, and Beckett wrote it for him before ever meeting him," Hurt observes. "He heard Magee on the radio and it was written for his voice. I think Magee always thought it was about him, but in fact it's about Beckett." The play demands that one actor holds the stage - and the attention of the audience - for its duration, so he has nobody else on whom he can rely.
"Yes," Hurt nods with a loud laugh, "and you've got nobody else to fuck it up." Of course, he is not strictly alone, because there is also the tape recorder with the voice and aspirations of the younger, more hopeful Krapp. The tape to be used in the Gate production this month is the same one John Hurt recorded when he first performed the play at the Barbican two years ago, which heightens the resonances of the play's themes.
"It's the same process as playing with somebody else, except that the tape recorder is a constant," he says. "I find it even more exciting this time, because as that tape recording goes further and further into time, it's getting nearer and nearer to the basis of the play. If I'm still using that same recording when I'm doing the play at the right age, which is when I'm 69, that should be fascinating.
"It's quite a mentally draining play to do because you can't let it go.
"There's never any rest. But then, I've actually quite liked doing it two shows a night, taking a half-hour break between performances. I just have time to have a cup of tea and patch up the make-up. That's all."
What gives the play its universality and enduring appeal is that everyone can relate to Krapp to some degree, because everyone has some regrets. "I've never come across anyone who didn't relate to it, and women in particular," Hurt says. "I think there's something in the whole idea of living a life without love which rings bells with everybody.
"Whether they've made a conscious decision or whether they've made a compromised decision, it's very deep. And so many people live by compromise. To be reminded by a play like this that you have accepted to live your life in a compromise can be fairly shattering, I imagine."
At 61, does John Hurt harbour any great regrets? "One reply to that is that I regret almost everything," he says.
"Any action is a choice, although there are philosophers who would say that we go through life and just think that we choose and and that we really have nothing at all to do with it.
"Anyway, whatever choice you make, you could have chosen slightly better, and in that sense one regrets everything. There are things I wish hadn't happened, but that's not necessarily regretting something. It's a different thing. I've been immensely fortunate. In this beleaguered life we all go through, I'm actually doing something that I adore doing."
The son of an Anglican vicar in Chesterfield, Hurt switched from art school to RADA, and over the past 40 years has displayed a depth of talent and insight in a diversity of roles - most affectingly, perhaps, in those where he bared his vulnerability: as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, which earned him a BAFTA; in Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, both of which secured him Oscar nominations; as the wrongly convicted and executed Timothy Evans in 10 Rillington Place, and in an astonishing portrayal of Winston Smith in 1984.
There was also his early major breakthrough role as the treacherous Richad Rich in A Man For All Seasons; his driven Caligula in the television series of I, Claudius; and memorable performances in The Shout, The Hit, Scandal, Alien (in which his stomach unforgettably - and graphically - exploded), and especially in Love and Death on Long Island as a reclusive Englishman hopelessly smitten with a US teen heart-throb, played by Jason Priestley.
The past two years have been particularly fruitful for him, garnering excellent reviews for Krapp's Last Tape on stage and on film, and for John Madden's film of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, in which Hurt was dignified and authoritative as the wise and caring doctor father of Pelagia (PenΘlope Cruz), the Greek islander who becomes involved with the Italian officer, Corelli (Nicolas Cage), during the second World War.
"The poor bugger who has come in for most of the criticism is Nic - I think, rather more than he's due for. He played the part to the best of his ability, and I don't think he made a bad job of it. The only thing is that Nic is not a romantic actor. John Madden had to try to weave a fabric that was going to include someone who wasn't a romantic actor when you needed someone who just sweeps her off her feet - and the audience has to see why. Nic is a Hamlet, not a Romeo."
Hurt has clearly been embarrassed by so many reviews which noted how he stole the film. "It's a compliment, but it's not one I sought. It worries me because my character is secondary to the main relationship in the film. It's a minor key and if the minor key becomes the major key then the film is upset."
He followed this role by playing an East End gangster in Tabloid, which co-stars Matthew Rhys as a sensationalistic TV presenter and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as his ruthlessly ambitious producer. He is equally pleased with his next movie, Carbon Miranda, to be released next year as Miranda.
"I wish they had stuck with the original title, but apparently it was too clever," he says. "It's a quirky love story with some beautiful writing." He is joined in the cast by Christina Ricci and John Simm.
However, he is most proud of his most recent production, Only Mahowney, his second for Richard Kwietniowski after Love and Death On Long Island. The new film tells the true story of a junior Toronto banker - played by the gifted Philip Seymour Hoffman - who employed his talent with finances to pay off a $10,000 debt by shifting it from somebody else's account.
"Then," Hurt says, "he lost it and went in deeper and deeper until he ended up embezzling $17 million over a period of two years. I think it will be a superb film."
Off-screen, John Hurt has been married three times, and he lost a long-time partner in a tragic riding accident. He has "very happily" been the partner of Sarah Owens for the past five years, he says, and he clearly relishes keeping in close contact with his two sons, Sasha (11) and Nicholas (8), who live half an hour away from his home.
Hurt moved to Ireland early in 1991 with his third wife, Jo Dalton, acquiring the ancestral home of Daniel Day-Lewis, Ballintubber House, near Athy. He first came here to star in Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the 1965 Dublin Theatre Festival, and began returning regularly to work on stage and in film. He acted with Peter O'Toole and Susannah York in Shaw's Man and Superman; in Brian Friel's Restoration farce, The London Vertigo; and in "a dreadful play" at the old Eblana, Tom Gallacher's The Only Street. In films, he played the title role in John Huston's period romp, Sinful Davey; Bird Flanagan in Jim Sheridan's The Field; and most recently, with Brenda Blethyn in Night Train, about which he speaks warmly.
"I used to come here whenever I had any spare time," John Hurt says. "I used to stay with Garech de Bruin, who introduced me to the best of things Irish - the poets, the Irish music I adore. I loved coming here, to a non-industrial country with which I shared a sense of humour, and was not class-ridden like England. And I responded so much to the landscape.
"I felt more at home here than I have felt anywhere else. I never felt at home in the Home Counties, even though I sound like it because I was sent away to school and have this received voice. England must be the only place where, if you're educated, you all have the same accent. Dublin has different accents, but they're all Dublin accents."
Krapp's Last Tape opens at the Gate Theatre on Tuesday