Pierre Chabert performs Krapp's Last Tapeas Samuel Beckett directed. He talks to Lara Marlowein Paris about his long relationship with the play.

It's not often that one has the opportunity to see a play directed by Samuel Beckett, 17-and-a-half years after the writer's death. But "directed" is the right word. The French actor Pierre Chabert will perform La Dernière Bande(first written in English by Samuel Beckett as Krapp's Last Tape) as directed by Beckett in the Granary Theatre, Cork, on Saturday.

Chabert met the great Irish writer and his French wife Suzanne in the early 1960s, when he was fresh out of drama school and sought permission to perform Krapp's Last Tape, a monologue in which a failed writer confronts his younger self.

Beckett agreed. Although he declined an invitation, saying he never watched his own plays, he sent Suzanne.

Chabert's first meeting with Beckett, for a drink at the Closerie des Lilas, helped determine the course of his life. "I was absolutely dazzled by his physical presence, by the light that came from his eyes. It was the light of intelligence. It created a momentous impression, a real shock," he recalls.

In 1972, Suzanne Beckett told Chabert she preferred his rendition of Krapp's Last Tapeto all others. A few days later, he received a note from her which he still treasures: "Dear Pierre, Would it interest you to play Krapp under Sam's direction?" Chabert went to the couple's apartment in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. "There was nothing on his work table, not a scrap of paper," he recalls. For more than an hour, Chabert annotated his own copy of the play with explanations and instructions dictated by Beckett. In particular, Beckett dwelled on the "farewell to love" scene in which, after a revelation about his own destiny as a writer, Krapp abandons love.

"I hadn't really understood the link between the character and Beckett himself," Chabert says. "In the play, Krapp is at the end of a jetty when he has the vision. Beckett told me he had the vision in his mother's room. He explained that a writer's destiny was to say Yes to his own darkness, to refuse nothing of his own failure, which is inside him.

"Beckett was the writer who played on introspection, who started from within himself," Chabert adds. "Unlike Joyce, he did not go towards the world, did not embrace it. On the contrary, Beckett starts with a sort of contraction. Everything must come out. There is no censorship on what he brings out of himself." To Chabert, Beckett explained subtleties of the play which are lost on the public; for example, how one can calculate that Krapp was 24 years old when he began recording the birthday tapes.

"There is A very precise complexity to it," Chabert explains. "Beckett had a very precise vision of his poetic art. He practised a sort of stylisation, of formalism." An amateur pianist, Beckett was deeply influenced by music. "His texts, especially the plays, are musical," Chabert says. "They are texts by a poet who counted every syllable. Take the names in Godot: Didi, Gogo, Pozzo, Lucky. Every name has two syllables, is fashioned by rhythm."

As a favour to his close friend Robert Pinget, Beckett directed Chabert in Pinget's Hypothèsein the mid 1960s. "I'll direct you, but we have to find a way to make it more theatrical," Beckett said.

Like Krapp's Last Tape, Hypothèseis a monologue by a writer. The character thinks about throwing his manuscript in a well, but in the end burns it in a coal stove. Beckett had the idea of placing a huge manuscript on the table, which Chabert gradually scattered over the stage.

"At the end, the stage floor was covered with blank pages. When the character had no more manuscript, he picked up pages and clutched them to him - it was a physical relationship with the manuscript, and it was magnificent."

Beckett was so pleased with the result that he sent Chabert to the Théâtre de l'Odéon, to meet Jean-Louis Barrault, the great actor and director. Barrault produced a triple bill of Pinget's play, two short Beckett plays and two plays by Eugène Ionesco. It was an incredible experience for the young Chabert. "I was surrounded by stars - Michael Lonsdale, Jean-Louis Barrault, Madeleine Renaud . . . " Barrault brought Chabert into his troupe. But the French culture minister André Malraux fired Barrault when he let the Odéon be used as a meeting place during the May 1968 student revolt. Chabert would re-join the troupe a few years later at the Gare Orsay Theatre, then at the legendary Théâtre du Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées.

Chabert was one of a handful of actors - Roger Blin, Jean Martin, David Warrilow, Madeleine Renaud and Billie Whitelaw were the others - whom Beckett trusted to interpret his work. In the 1980s, Chabert directed rather than performed Beckett's plays, in particular for an 80th birthday retrospective in 1986. Chabert's were the only rehearsals that Beckett attended. Over the past year, Chabert repeated the experience, as artistic director of the Festival Paris Beckett 2006-2007. Close to 200,000 people have attended 450 performances from Beckett's entire oeuvre.

Before he died, Beckett met Chabert in the PLM cafe near his flat in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. "He said, 'These are for you. They're my last plays. I'm giving them to you, but you have to direct them alone'." The bundle contained Berceuse, Catastrophe, which was dedicated to the Czech writer Vaclav Havel, and Ohio Impromptu.

"I was blown away," recalls Chabert. "I never would have dared ask him. I directed all three plays at the Théâtre du Rond-Point."

But Krapp's Last Tape remains the first Beckett play that Chabert discovered, and the only one in which Beckett directed him as an actor. "I have travelled through life with this play," he says.

"I acted in it when I was around 20. Now I'm nearing the age of the character (69), and this play is still with me. It certainly helped me to evolve, to overcome the painful things of life. I play it now with more openness, more distance. There is a lot of emotion, but there is humour, and acceptance."

Chabert has no doubt that the torment of Krapp on his 69th birthday is relevant today. "These are timeless human situations," he explains. "They are archetypes. It is also a play about time, memory, ageing, and the fact that one gets to an age where one is forced to weigh up one's life. If people want material success, they can achieve it. But if they have an ideal - love, perfection - there is inevitably a degree of failure." Chabert's career has encompassed the last half century of French theatre. The deaths of Beckett and Barrault were a terrible loss, but their legacy is a consolation. "You have the texts that stay inside you and accompany you," he says.

•As part of celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the Alliance Française in Cork, Pierre Chabert will perform Krapp's Last Tapein French at the Granary Theatre, Cork, on Sat at 8pm. Bookings: 021-4904275. Three short silent films by Samuel Beckett will be screened at Triskel at 8pm on Fri. Bookings: 021-4272722. Both events can be booked through the Alliance Française at 021-4310677