Directing Waiting for Godot in Ulaan Bataar brings unexpected enlightenment and profundity to Sarahjane Scaife's understanding of Beckett

"You are doing what? Where?" they asked.

"Waiting for Godot - in Mongolia."

The request for me to go had come via an e-mail to Brian Singleton of Trinity College. Saraa from Mongolia was looking for Sara from Ireland. Could Brian Singleton help find her! Saraa Sarantuya of Mongolia's National Theatre had heard of a Beckett Workshop that Singleton had organised in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2001 and wanted me to work on Beckett's Waiting for Godot with her group in Ulaan Bataar.

It was only as we were flying in over Mongolia that I became aware of exactly how remote it is. We flew in over the mountains and steppes of central Asia; miles of desert hills covered in snow, like flying over the moon. It didn't seem real at all. If credits had started rolling up over the landscape, it wouldn't have surprised me. Nothing could have prepared me for this bleak Beckettian landscape. No cars, roads, buildings or trees. Just nothingness. I looked at the two girls I had been chatting to since leaving Moscow in a new light. What to me seemed so alien must have been to them so familiar.

The feeling of distance and unfamiliarity grew everyday. The only words of English I heard in the small hotel I stayed in were spoken by my waiter. "English?" "No, Irish." "Ah Westlife," he said, grinning, and that was that.

One night, when I returned to my room, there was no electricity. I managed to get a couple of candles to read by and spent a nervous night listening to the stray dogs howl outside my window. There was no way to call Ireland from the hotel, yet there were men walking around outside carrying large white phones. At first I thought they were selling them, but Lkhavgaa, my interpreter, told me that they were like a public mobile phone. Cars have only started to be imported in the last eight years, and yet you can't move in Ulaan Baatar with the traffic. Outside Ulaan Baatar, there are hardly any roads.

The theatre was enormous and hanging down the front were giant banners advertising what was on. Sarantuya drew my attention to what they said: giant letters spelled "Bekett"; beside them in equally giant letters stood my name in red. Pretty intimidating! Although only 70 years old, the theatre was very dilapidated, with armies of women cleaning the broken tiles and faded carpets with rags and buckets of water. To one side, there was a huge iron gate. A man was stationed there, employed to sit in his hut all day waitingto open the gate every time a car passed.

The first day brought with it some very exciting things, but also some very worrying developments. The actors were a delight to work with, throwing themselves 100 per cent into improvisations. Give them an idea, and they would come back with 10 more, all worked out and brilliantly executed. We worked on the stage area with about 30 people sitting in the auditorium: a mixture of students, teachers directors and writers. Lkhavgaa had a microphone which she would use like a ringmaster as she translated what I was saying.

However, when we looked at the script of Godot, my eyes started to open to the absurdity of the situation. This was the very first translation of Beckett into Mongolian, translated from Russian! It had been the winner of a competition for translations of "modern scripts", Beckett not having been authorised during the Soviet regime. We sat in a circle reading, with Lkhavgaa translating for me. It became apparent that what they were saying was not what I was reading. Because of a basic lack of understanding of the notion of the play, there were many mistakes in translation.

We struggled on line by line for a couple of hours. I could feel the atmosphere becoming heavy, whereas that morning it had been electric. Stopping the reading, I asked the actors what they thought on first reading the play. They confessed to complete bafflement. What they had been looking for were character and plot and they were hoping that I would show them where it was. Of course that was exactly what they were not going to get with Beckett.

We had an emergency meeting. Sarantuya asked me if I could just take a section of the play, a part where something happens. Also, if we could leave out the bits about religion, as they would hold no interest for the Mongolians. My heart sank. They wanted me to take the Beckett out of Beckett, the Waiting out of Godot. It was then that I realised that it wasn't identification with the themes of Beckett's work that had drawn the Mongolians to Beckett, but rather his popularity as an icon of modern theatre.

Theatre in Mongolia is of the large and dramatic variety. Beckett is at the other end of the spectrum.

The whole notion of less is best took a while for the actors to trust. However, by the final day, they had played a Beckett joke on me that literally took my breath away.

When I came down to the rehearsal, my students had exchanged places with 22 different actors. They even swapped clothes so that it took a while before I noticed something not quite right. Gradually, I noticed one or two faces that I didn't recognise.

By the time I realised that none of these people were the actors that I had been working with all along I was in complete shock. Lkhavgaa had gone on some fictitious errand, so I was incommunicado. I felt as if I had fallen down the White Rabbit's hole and had ended up in a different reality.

For 10 days, we had been talking about the impossibility of validating the truth of existence in any way and had been looking at Beckett's theatre in this light. In 15 minutes, they had succeeded in demonstrating this to me in the most existential way.

They used their Stanislavski training to work as a group, running in and out of the theatre, gradually exchanging places until the same clothes revealed the original actors once more. It was a very unnerving experience!

Sarantuya and her troupe were like Roger Blin and Beckett's supporters in Paris in the 1950s. What they were doing by taking on Beckett's work at this time in Mongolia was very brave. We have such a sense of familiarity with his work and aesthetic in the West that we find it hard to understand how revolutionary his theatrical devices were in the 1950s. Mongolia is recapturing that sense of discovery.

"Mongolia," I answered the customs man as he questioned me suspiciously.

"Beckett."

"Jesus, go on then," he said incredulously waving me through.