It was a dirty oul day. A dirty, rotten oul day. A day of postponed barbeques, cancelled boat trips and we’ll just have to have it indoors. One of those crushing days when Summer gets trapped in a dank cave and has to pass through a waterfall to escape.

So a perfect day, then, to go and wallow in misery with Mr S. B. Beckett and all his fawning acolytes at that oul festival. ‘Happy Days’ they call it, ironically.

I didn’t know the first thing about Beckett. I knew lots of secondary things, like he is the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in the Wisden Cricketer’s almanac, but that is just the sort of trivia people mention when they know nothing of the essence of the man. It is rather like telling everyone that Vincent Van Gogh got his ten metre swimming badge at the age of four. And that he was a big fan of sausages.

Beckett’s play ‘Catastrophe’ sounded like it might offer more in the way of action than a play with ‘Waiting’ in the title, so I chose that one. Besides, it was at a ‘secret location’, the audience being bussed there from Enniskillen Castle, and I was sold on the mystery of that alone.

Most of my fellow travellers were from out of town and I rested in smug familiarity as we chugged through those narrow country lanes around the back of Topped mountain. Until we turned left, that is, and I realised I had not been on that road before. After a bumpy mile or two we eventually emerged at an old, unkempt graveyard, with headstones surfacing out of sodden moss and briars. “Any colour, so long as it’s grey”, directed Beckett of his own grave. There stood a tiny adjoining derelict church and it was not until I reached the door that I recognised the bend in the road at Pubble, Tempo, now forever re-orientated in my mind having approached from an unexpected direction.

Oh isn’t it WONderful! gasped a lady from somewhere comfortable down south, placing her hand on my thigh as we perched in the old pews. An almost medieval atmosphere hung in the place, with a hooded figure standing motionless on a plinth at the front. ‘It’s just soooo Beckett’, she said excitedly, ‘he was SUCH a master at stripping the essential human condition’.

‘Oh yes, yes he was’, I ventured. ‘And quite the cricketer too’.

A gruff man on the makeshift stage took a seat in an old leather arm chair and lit a cigar. A nervous woman hovered beside him, anxiously studying the hooded figure. The musty recesses of the old church darkened to nothing in the fading lights and suddenly it was happening.

Fermanagh accents, that was the surprising thing. Unmistakably Fermanagh accents, as roughly dredged from the soggy fields as the bus driver’s. For some reason I expected English accents, all clipped with classical training, but of course here was the local drawl lodged deep in Beckett’s own inner ear.

The man in the chair is the short-tempered director of a play, instructing his assistant (the woman) to manipulate and mould the figure on the plinth. He grows increasingly impatient and aggressively dictatorial about how the figure should appear. Upon the director’s demands the woman hurriedly removes the figure’s garments until it shivers in the cold. She unclenches its hands from fists, to rearrange them to a more submissive clasp. There is no firm context, little discernable style, no real action and no character build.

“I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding”, Beckett once explained, and his frugality was evident here. It is only a short play but if pauses can be pregnant they were uncomfortably beyond term, yet still carrying their weight. The tension was strung out between the walls of that stark little church until it seemed they might implode.

The Director then breaks into a slightly crazed delight from off the stage and is gone, happy that the figure is now as he wants him. The lights close in on the figure’s head, now visibly sentient, and as he slowly lifts his gaze he beams a piercing and defiant smile into the darkness.

The lady beside me had by this stage been transported in total rapture from any sense of earthly presence at all. I admit that I too had been touched, and I don’t mean by her. I didn’t know at that stage that Beckett dedicated the play to his friend Václav Havel, the Czech playwright imprisoned for dissent against the communist regime. But delivered there clearly, in the mood of it, was a sense of stoic resistance, triumph even, and of the preservation of humanity in the face of tyranny.

Perhaps where we fail to empathise with Beckett’s themes we are the lucky ones, and it would not be for want of trying on the part of festival director Sean Doran. His programme is not parachuted in but firmly grounded in the locality. For Fermanagh people these are familiar locations from new perspectives. Familiar accents with startling moods and message. It is about accessing something of Beckett’s essence, even if you remain the ‘non-knower’ he expects you to be. It is, at least, to know the first thing about Beckett.