'I suppose it's raining in Dublin as usual'

It would have been like Shakespeare watching you play Hamlet Actor Barry McGovern recalls first meeting Beckett: he just seemed to materialise

I first got to know Samuel Beckett the writer when I saw a production of Waiting for Godot on television when I was 12 years old. It was the summer of 1961. The play struck a chord deep within me. Little did I know then what a big part it would play in my life.

I first got to know Samuel Beckett the man in 1986 when Michael Colgan and I went to Paris to set up my one-man Beckett show, I'll Go On. We had been in correspondence with Beckett about the show for some time leading up to the Gate opening in September 1985, and he had been very supportive. He wrote saying he would be happy to meet and did so one April afternoon at the PLM Hotel.

It was almost opposite his apartment on the Boulevard St Jacques. Having arrived late at our hotel the previous day, a message awaited us. Monsieur Beckett had called and would call back at 7pm. At seven on the dot the phone rang in Michael's room. It was Beckett, suggesting we meet him the next day at half-past-two.

Needless to say we arrived early. Waiting for Beckett. At 2.30pm precisely we saw him. We hadn't seen him come in. He just seemed to materialise at the stroke of 2.30. Tall, but slightly stooped, his "gull's eyes" flashed around the lobby. We approached and after initial greetings I mumbled something about the weather. His first words to me were: "I suppose it's raining in Dublin as usual". We followed him at his suggestion in to the little cafe adjoining the lobby. We had a beer followed by coffee. He opened a pack of cheroots and offered me one, asking if I shared that vice. Though only a small smoker, I couldn't resist smoking one of Beckett's cheroots. He pored over photos of Robert Ballagh's remarkable set (his first for the theatre) and thanked us for the "fine poster" (also designed by Ballagh).

We gave him presents of a bottle of Irish whiskey and Ballagh's book of Dublin photographs. He was keen to know all about the show and the reaction. Michael said that if he wished to see a dress rehearsal he would make sure it was totally private. He wrote down carefully on the back of his cheroot box the time and place.

When we got back to Paris three weeks later we received a message: "Mr. Beckett told me to tell you he won't come this evening . . ." To tell you the truth I was half relieved. It would have been like Shakespeare watching you play Hamlet.

THREE WEEKS LATER I performed I'll Go On in Paris on the same street, Boulevard Raspail, where En Attendant Godot was first performed 33 years earlier. Shortly before the first performance we received a telegram which read: "De coeur avec vous tous ce soir. Sam Beckett".

The next day Beckett met Michael and me again, joined by other members of the I'll Go On team, Gerry Dukes and Rupert Murray. When Michael and I saw him approaching and went to greet him, his first words were: "Where are the lads?"

Other meetings followed over the years. We spoke of many things including his relationship with Joyce, on which he was very forthcoming. I asked him some questions about his work and he was both helpful and generous in his replies.

I wished I'd asked him more. One day when we were saying goodbye he said: "Thank you for what you're doing for the work". I didn't know what to say.

On one visit I gave him a copy of a cassette I recorded for The Abbey Reads series of tapes. It was an 80th birthday salute and consisted of Dante and the Lobster and From an Abandoned Work. I received a note from him a few days later: "Dear Barry . . . Have just listened to your Dante etc. and From etc. Excellent. Congratulations. Thought of an alternative close to former. Instead of 'It is not' 'Like hell it is'. Better? Worse? Can't decide. All best to you all. Sam Beckett".

Towards the end of his life he was living in a nursing home not far from his apartment. I met him there in the summer of 1989 with my wife, Medb, and her son Barra (then aged seven). Medb and Beckett had met before and, among other things, discussed visual art, which was close to their hearts. When we were leaving, Beckett said he must get something for Barra and found a box of chocolate animals. They were in our fridge for years. No one wanted to finish off Beckett's chocolates. He was frail, and as we left he embraced us warmly - Didi and Gogo. I sensed we would never see him again. Perhaps he did too.

AS LUCK WOULD have it, we were back in Paris in November. I rang him and he said to come round next day. He was weak but in good form. We laughed frequently. I said I'd love to do Endgame again as it was my favourite of his plays. "Mine too," he said.

I remarked on the title of a little book of his which he gave us, Le monde et le pantalon. This refers to the story told by Nagg in Endgame about the Englishman who gets exasperated because his tailor cannot make him a pair of trousers in three months when it took God only six days to make the world. Beckett then acted out wondrously the lines: "But my dear sir, my dear sir, look [disdainful gesture, disgustedly] - at the world - - and look - [loving gesture, proudly] at my trousers!" He would have been a perfect Nagg. When we left him he embraced us for the last time. I can still feel the stubble.

On the few occasions I've been back to Paris since his death, I've always paid a visit to his simple grave in the Montparnasse cemetery. "What colour do you want your gravestone, Sam?" "Any colour so long as it's grey."

An apocryphal story, perhaps, but I believe it. It is grey: a flat, grey marble slab. I always stay awhile there in the silence among the shades of Baudelaire, Saint-Saëns, Sartre, de Beauvoir and the actress Delphine Seyrig who both supported him in the early days and performed his work.

Before I leave, I place 16 stones (they're pebbles, but I call them stones) on his gravestone. And I think of the epitaph on the gravestone of the narrator's father in First Love: "Hereunder lies the above who up below So hourly died that he lived on till now."

Barry McGovern reads Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable on a new RTÉ Radio CD box set. www.rte.ie/shop