`Beckett said to me a very important sentence: `Musique avant tout' - first of all music. Music is the queen of the arts and he said to me as a joke: `I regret very much that I am not a musician. I would prefer to be a musician, a composer or a conductor, but I haven't enough talent to be a musician so I have to be a writer'. "

Director Antoni Libera grins and shrugs, so you know exactly what he thinks of this kind of faux-modest statement by his friend and hero, Samuel Beckett. Libera is in Ireland to put the final polish on tonight's opening performance of Endgame, a production first seen at the Gate theatre in 1991, which has since done service at festivals in Melbourne and New York. For Libera, who was born and lives in Warsaw, Poland, music is one of the most important elements to be considered in what he says Beckett called "the only play he hadn't to be ashamed of".

He shows me painstaking lists of "echoes" or recurring motifs pulled from the text and points out that like the number of voices in the play, the number of steps on the ladder on stage, and the number of instruments in a string quartet, they come in fours or multiples thereof. "When I asked Beckett once who will be able to notice it in the theatre, he said: `I don't care' and he gave me a musical example of a Bach cantato . . . Bach used 25 notes in a section and the word `God' was in the 13th position, exactly in the centre. When you listen to it, you can't hear that it is exactly in the middle of the work, or the middle of a section of notes but it is an act of - how can I describe it - crystallisation. It is the same with Dante's Divine Comedies."

It is unusual for a director to be able to state with such certainty what a playwright intended, and when that playwright is the reclusive Beckett, it is more unusual still. Such are Antoni Libera's personal and intellectual connections with Beckett, that it is hardly surprising that his vision of the director is what he himself calls "traditionalist". "The director of Beckett's plays should be like a conductor in the Philharmonic. All directors who begin to change something or make a variation, must end in failure - it is not a good way. I have often heard the question: `Then what is the freedom of the director of a Beckett play?'

"I always reply that to direct very precisely what Beckett wanted is extremely difficult. So you have freedom; it's just different to that you have when you stage Shakespeare or other, modern authors.

"I would add too, that the role of director is a 20th century invention - previously there was a stage manager and the actors or, in ancient times, the playwright as director. The playwright in my view is the most important. My role is only a useful, helpful one: I am an assistant to the playwright."

Such an overwhelming reverence for the text is perhaps understandable, given the context in which Libera's relationship with Beckett developed. It sprang from a written correspondence and grew to be an important working friendship: Libera's joint production of Krapp's Last Tape and Catastrophe was the last production of his own work with which Beckett was involved before his death in 1989, and Beckett used to call him "my deputy in Eastern Europe".

Libera remembers the exact date on which he first met Beckett in Paris: January 6th, 1978. "I said to Beckett: `Do you remember that 25 years ago today it was the premiere of this play?' and he said, `So you remember it too?'. I said to him: `My connection with your work is very, very deep because while you were writing Waiting for Godot between October 1948 and January 1949, my mother was pregnant with me. So you created this play while my mother created me."

Eight years later in 1956, a major production of the play opened in Warsaw. "It was an extraordinary success, and of course the reason was that the interpretation of this play was not at all metaphysical or philosophical but political - people identified the Godot character as the promise of Communism that never happened." Tickets were scarce but Libera's parents managed to get two and smuggled the young Antoni in with them; it was the first production he ever saw in the theatre.

Eventually, Libera did his thesis on Beckett, realised the amount of mistakes in the existing Polish translations of his work and set about doing his own versions of all Beckett's plays, a task he has now completed. Out of a working correspondence a friendship grew; when martial law was established during Solidarity times in Poland in 1981, Beckett immediately sent food parcels. As a director Libera would ask Beckett "very technical things - the measure of how long a pause should be, corrections in the text if there was more than one version. He gave me general directions as to the tone or the climate of the play." Out of such directions and out of his own experience, Libera has formed his "credo" on how to direct Beckett plays.

Endgame is his favourite 20th century play, bar none and as he leaves the Gate theatre to head back to rehearsals, he declares that directing the Gate production is: "One of the best theatre experiences of my life. And I love Dublin. Yes, it is my happy days."

Endgame is at the Gate theatre from tonight for 10 performances.