LANGUAGE is the lifeline for the battered yet not quite beaten characters inhabiting the blackly hilarious world of Samuel Beckett. Just as the tramps in Wailing for Godot engage in absurd word games devised in the hope of warding off silence and boredom, Winnie, the irrepressible heroine of Happy Days, tries to keep busy through a routine of little rituals and the business of bouncy chatter. In doing so, she is exploring what it is to be human.

Initially confined up to her waist in earth later up to her neck, she recalls her life through a monologue of witty bathos directed at Willie, her sole audience and whose continuing presence confirms she is still alive.

"Ah yes, if only I could bear to be alone, I mean prattle away with not a soul to hear. (Pause.) Not that I flatter myself you hear much, no Willie, God forbid. (Pause.) Days perhaps when you hear nothing. (Pause.) But days too when you answer. (Pause.) So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, of this is being heard, I am not merely to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do - for any length of time. (Pause.) That is what enables me to go on, go on talking that is. (Pause.) Whereas if, you were to die - (smile) - to speak in the old style - (smile off) - or go away and leave me, then what would I do, what could I do, all day long, I mean between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep?"

Barry McGovern who plays Willie to Rosaleen Linehan's Winnie in Karel Reisz's new production of Happy Days which begins a week long run at the Gate Theatre on Friday, is appearing in the play for the first time. Through the international success of his one man show, I'll Go On based on selected passages from the prose trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable - which he has to date performed 155 times, as well as appearances in several acclaimed productions of Waiting j6r Godot and Endgame McGovern has assumed the mantle of "Beckett Actor" previously conferred on the late Jack MacGowran. The tag has little effect on McGovern, a practical, unaffected working actor whose scholarly textual knowledge of Beckett's work is marked by a lively fascination rather than by weighty obsession: "The work is awe-ful, full of awe in the way that Mozart is too easy for children and too difficult for adults. I love Beckett for the humour."

WEARING what he calls "my de Valera coat", he has the appearance of a student from a 19th-century Russian novel, appearing cheerful rather than driven. On seeing a bike parked in the street, he casually quotes from Moll: "Dear bicycle. I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation. I don't know why. It is a pleasure to meet it again. To describe it at length would be a pleasure. It had a little red horn instead of the bell fashionable in your days. To blow this horn was for me a real pleasure, almost a vice."

Working on Happy Days has brought him to a new understanding of a play he sees as funny, sad, real and human. I've discovered the `ness' of the other, it is the essence of this couple." As with Beckett's other works, the play dramatises the normal. Winnie is a heroic figure, determined to go on. "The play is about getting from the bell for waking to the bell for sleeping. It's about going on, which is at the centre of all Beckett's work."

Sidestepping in and out of various Beckett texts and quoting freely, McGovern's conversation is enjoyable, dense with reference and backed up by the small library of Beckett books he is carrying in his bag. He refers to a note he once received from Beckett. It was at the end of the year, not exactly a Christmas card, and it read: "Best Wishes for another turn of the screw". McGovern's youngest child is called Sam, but this appears to be a coincidence - or is it?

Although McGovern believes that actors can learn from academics just as academics can learn from actors, McGovern's approach to Beckett is free of much of the reverence which both camps tend to bring to the work. Whereas many performers have complained about the physical hardship Beckett's plays impose, McGovern instead speaks about the challenge. Somehow, although he has emerged as a Beckett expert, he has also managed to avoid being typecast.

Pointing out that Beckett saw the worldly Willie as a turtle, McGovern comments: "Willie spends most of his time crawling around a mound of earth. He has relatively little to do, almost all of the work is Winnie's, but I've also realised through working on it how much more there is to Willie than you'd think. There is actually a lot in what may appear so little." Few writers have had such a compassionate grasp of the blurring between despair and optimism, no matter how dismal life is, the Beckett character tends to want to go on to survive.

Beckett's precisely detailed stage directions are almost plays in themselves. Happy Days is no exception; so how much freedom can a director enjoy when the playwright has determined the physical movements of the characters to such an extent? McGovern stresses that for all his deliberation, Beckett was flexible.

"He was extremely practical. I think he tended to appear to take full control at the outset of any production he was involved in, but he was reasonable and above all, practical. If he saw that something wasn't working, changed it."

McGovern wears his learning lightly. Beckett's work has featured in his acting career from his earliest days at UCD's Dram Soc. "I first became aware of Beckett when I was about 12, I saw Waiting For Godot on BBC with Jack MacGowran in it. It was only afterwards I realised what I had watched." He has appeared in four productions of Waiting jar Godot and having played Vladimir twice as well as Estragon and Lucky remarks: "I only have Pozzo and the boy to go." Endgame is his favourite Beckett play: "It's sharp, tightly written, so biting and very funny, and full of quotes like `If I don't kill that rat, he'll die'."

Next month, at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity College, marking the 90th anniversary of Beckett's birth, McGovern performs Krapp's Last Tape for the first time. Pointing to a passage from an early version of the text, he notes the many changes, such as the word desk" instead of "table", and "thirty seven" instead of "thirty nine", and that initially Beckett had intended Krapp to be a clownish figure. "As a play it is remarkable, very moving, a portrait of a life. It is also a male monologue predating Winnie's female one. They were both written in English."

Despite his love of Beckett's writings, he says if he could only bring one book to a desert island, "it would probably be Ulysees". Having already directed All That Fall for RTE Radio, McGovern appears to have a natural director's instinct and says he would like to direct Joyce's Exiles: "Four characters in search of a lover".

From now until the middle of August McGovern's life will be dominated by Beckett's words. This production of Happy Days is one of the three Beckett works in which he is appearing during the Gate's Beckett Festival in New York. It is an exciting time for him, his only complaint is that the festival clashes with the Olympic Games. "I think I'll be on stage when Sonia O'Sullivan is running." It is a dilemma with which Beckett would have sympathised. At the end of Happy Days, Willie reappears. "He is on all fours, dressed to kill - top hat, morning coat, striped trousers, etc," read the stage directions. "Is he reaching for her" ponders McGovern "or is he reaching for the gun? Is he going to do himself in, or do her in?" He likes the ambiguity. As a performer and interpreter his greatest pleasure rests in alerting people to Beckett's humour. "I always love hearing people remark `I never knew Beckett was so funny.'"