AS one who looked in vain through suburban libraries and bookshops in search of Beckett (`You might just find him under Irish fiction, between Behan and Binchy') I drew a blank and thus came, in a manner of speaking, as a virgin to the Gate.

The revival of Endgame is a totally confident demonstration of the wry smiles that can be derived from disintegration. Beckett couches his sense of the ridiculous and tragic in rhythms of movement and language that are mesmeric.

Robert Ballagh's bleak, painterly box is cellar, prison and burial vault, in which the voluble Hamm (Alan Stanford commanding the centre-stage without baring his eyes or batting an eyelid) and his gawky-walking companion/slave, Clov, (Barry McGovern who is mobility personified) move inexorably towards final partings and likely annihilation. Clov is the only one with working legs. He stumps from hatch to hatch, in and out the swing doors from the 10x10x10 kitchen, bearing step ladder, flea powder, unfinished dog, gaff. Existence is reduced ad absurdem, but it do help to pass the time, don't it?

Words become the foils with which Hamm asserts his domination and Clov thrusts and parries for survival. Antoni Libera (director) has drawn performances of symbiotic perfection from Stanford and McGovern. The monosyllabic retort, the reverberating sentence and the devastating oneliner (`You're on earth - there's no cure for this') are tested with absolute deference to nuance and have the consistency of fine wine.

Bill Golding (Nagg) and Pauline Flanagan (Nell) make appropriate interventions from under their bin-lids. If eventually I get hold of the text I suspect it will resound with the prospect (`Something is taking its course') of loss of senses, paralysed relationships and pressing futility. At the Gate, the rituals, the actions, the stories and the gruff ironies are rendered memorably uplifting.