The Beckett Trilogy, showing at the Axis, Ballymun, Dublin is reviewed by Fintan O'Toole.

Of the actors' voices that got inside Samuel Beckett's head, two were Irish. Patrick Magee's growl from the bowels of the earth and Jack MacGowran's despairing lilt were not just interpretations of Beckett's work, but actually helped to shape it. No other actor will ever enjoy, therefore, the same intimate relationship with Beckett and, until now, only one other Irish voice - Barry McGovern's in his one-man compendium I'll Go On - could be said to breathe the same air. To that exalted triumvirate, however, must be added a fourth.

Conor Lovett's astonishing performance of extracts from Beckett's great prose trilogy - Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable - is at once utterly respectful and completely original. Lovett completely inhabits the sound and spirit of Beckett's work.

At the same time, he frees it from the captivity of those commanding early performances.

In a celebrated passage from Waiting for Godot, Beckett evokes "all the dead voices". Dead voices haunt contemporary performances too. MacGowran's genius and the authority which he derived from Beckett's trust make it hard for anyone to approach the performance of the prose works with an entirely open mind. And yet, if these texts are to retain a place in the life of the theatre, that authority has to be challenged.

This, of course, begs the question of whether these novels do have a place in the theatre at all. Lovett's show carries the ambivalent imprimatur "the texts are extracts from novels intended to be read and are recited here with the kind permission of the Samuel Beckett Estate". The implied warning - recite but do not perform - is entirely valid. Beckett, after all, knew a thing or two about writing plays, and when he chose to present a text as prose, we must respect his judgment.

Lovett, though, makes a virtue of this necessity. He performs without scenery, props, or any but the simplest lighting. The visual simplicity imposes its own burden, forcing us to concentrate completely on the actor. Lovett carries it, though, with fabulous grace. If the texts are, as the Estate insists, recited, Lovett gives a recital in the musical sense, a stripped-down solo performance of naked virtuosity.

He makes a virtue, too, of the fact that the texts are prose and not plays. For what interests him is precisely the nature of narrative, the way Beckett constructs and deconstructs Molloy, Malone and the Unnamable around the attempt to put one word after another in the increasingly futile attempt to make a story.

It is in this notion that Lovett finds a way both to be completely faithful to Beckett and to escape the shadow of his great Irish interpreters. For by working with and through the idea of narrative, Lovett forges a vital connection with the Irish tradition of storytelling. One way of putting it is that whereas the classical interpreters see Beckett as the child of Joyce, Lovett sees him as also the child of Yeats and Lady Gregory.

What you get with MacGowran and McGovern is the Beckett who belongs to Joyce's urbane continental world, rooted in the popular culture of the early 20th century: vaudeville, clowning, silent movies. The hangdog tomfoolery of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin is a huge presence in Beckett's mental universe and they embodied it on stage. Watching Lovett, however, you think not of Chaplin or Keaton, but of Eamon Kelly. His persona is the seanachaí unplugged, the storyteller without the baroque rhetoric and the time-honoured traditions, without even the feeling that there is anyone left to listen.

Some of the work is done by Lovett's brave decision to speak in his own Cork accent, a choice that immediately puts the texts into a different territory. The querulous tone of barely concealed outrage that comes with the accent fits the tone of voice of Beckett's narrators like a filthy, ragged, but curiously comfortable glove. And Lovett uses it to interrogate, with extraordinary technical command, every phrase, every word, every syllable. He makes the texts at once completely clear and utterly strange.

The result is a cold, hard jewel of a performance, an absolutely riveting experience that, if it ever comes your way, is worth dropping everything to encounter.