THE honours degree students of the Samuel Beckett Centre mounted a fascinating tribute to Beckett as part of the commemorations of his 90th birthday. They took as their starting point the author's known resistance to the search for meanings in his stage works and, while I find them far, from meaningless, it is true that they are primarily an experience, an almost sensory sharing of a particular and often profound view of life.

The chosen plays were, Rockaby, Footfalls, Play and Not I, and the experiment was to perform them simultaneously in four framed stages around the venue's perimeter while the audience was free to move around in the centre. Certainly, it was difficult to focus on word meanings in this ambience. The old woman rocked in her chair to the mutterings of a disembodied voice; another woman paced to and fro, almost crushed by the burden of age; three heads, emerging from urns, emitted a torrent of words; an illuminated mouth gabbled with intensity.

The test of all this was, for me, the usual one for Beckett; it touched nerves. From the beginning, the isolation of the four stages, intensified by efficient lighting, and the waxen faces of the actors created an atmosphere somewhere between the eerie and the tragic. The experiment, as a one off and different approach to Beckett succeeded .