John Hurt (Krapp's Last Tape)

I've never played Beckett before. I gave a reading of Lessness a few years ago, which was an eye-opener for me. I became aware of the spell he weaves on audiences. He's not easily accessible and at first his work seems very restrictive for an actor, because of the detailed stage directions. In the beginning you have to give yourself a certain amount of latitude, but you constantly rework it until you end up with the same economy that exists in Beckett's writing. He distills and re-distills the text, like a whisky, to get something that is extremely pure and rich. He is one of the great playwrights, although it's hard to put your finger on quite what his special quality is. Krapp's Last Tape is one of his more accessible plays, in human terms. Krapp is a man who probably opened the wrong door in life, and is full of remorse for that choice. It is certainly a dark piece, but we shouldn't shy away from tragedy in theatre; it's probably a deeper experience than comedy. I think the audience will find the play moving rather than gloomy. I hope they'll be able to come on the journey with me. But I'm not taking anything for granted until I perform it in front of an audience. We'll have to wait and see.

Niall Buggy (That Time)

This piece is a discovery for me. Because it hasn't any punctuation, it's not easy. But you have to make it easy. You have to speak it aloud and get the rhythm of it, and concentrate on getting to the end of the line. That requires considerable technical ability. And it's recorded now, so my worry is that I'll go, "Oh God, that's completely wrong", and I can't go back and do it again.

If Beckett is treated with reverence, he's ruined. We must never lose sight of the humour that makes him accessible and not at all alienating. It is humour in bleakness, which is a miraculous thing; it enables us to face the despair and the grief and the nothingness. Also, Beckett changed his mind often in rehearsal. We have to get rid of the idea that writers know what they are writing as they're writing it. They only know after it is written. Beckett gives the actor great freedom, freedom to interpret creatively. If you watch the recorded performances of Marie Keane and Jackie MacGowran you can see that they both made Beckett their own - and he adored them. There has been too much written about Beckett, too much specific interpretation. Rather than struggling to make sense of Beckett, which is like trying to make sense of life, the actor has to be at ease with him, and just open the door and let him in. You don't go to Beckett, you let Beckett come to you.

Niamh Cusack (Not I)

My stomach churned when I was offered this part and there's a bit of me that's still scared. It's a huge challenge. But it's also an incredibly giving piece for an actor, because it's so well thought out, right down to the stage directions and the choice of music. These are very helpful and stimulating. It's an amazing feat of writing. It's quite tormented, with an aching understanding and pain for humanity, full of bravery. There are lots of layers in the work: the more you work through them the more you can adhere to what Beckett has written. More is given to us by the truly great writers like him. There's a vast playground there and a vast safety net, if you can trust it. It is a great discipline and it requires craft, and through this, the individual actor's soul will emerge. It's only prescriptive in the sense that you could say Shakespeare is prescriptive because you must stick to the metre - once you have obeyed that, you can go anywhere. The difficulty is being simple. Once you have agreed to be simple, you have great freedom. There is a danger of being too reverential about Beckett and of talking too much about his writing. I adore his work, and Waiting For Godot is my favourite play in the world, but it's a play.

Barry McGovern (Waiting For Godot; Endgame, Happy Days)

Beckett is arguably the best playwright of the 20th century, exploring the human condition and asking essential questions of life and existence. He was a great man of the theatre - when he was directing his work he cut and changed things if they weren't working for the actors. He worked like a painter or a musician, creating a total picture, in which light plays a huge part. His plays are like musical scores, with enormous scope for creativity. They are not restrictive. Even in Endgame, where Hamm is in a wheelchair and is restricted physically, it's still a great role. Walter Asmus directs this production of Godot, which we have performed over quite a few years now. He was an assistant to Beckett, so I feel that it's close to Beckett's own production. I have played both Vladimir and Estragon. It's a great pleasure and joy to work on it with such good people. This time we have our original Lucky, Stephen Brennan, back with us. We're all discovering new things in it - it endlessly yields up its mysteries. You could spend your life interpreting it. Some of the other plays are more like chamber music, with their detailed stage directions, but with this there is enormous scope for creativity. Every production is different. Beckett is also one of the funniest writers of the century. If Beckett is boring, it's badly done.

Susan Fitzgerald (Footfalls; Come and Go)

Footfalls is one of the most difficult things I've ever done. As an actor you tend to try to make a performance interesting, to give it style and energy. But you quickly realise that Beckett is not interested in the surface: he's interested in what goes on underneath. You have to shed the surface and stop worrying about the externals, and that goes against everything you've ever learned as an actor. Beckett was almost monastic in his approach to theatre. He felt that a lot of modern, Western culture is concerned with what we can control, and he wanted to go back to a pre-conscious level. He invites us to step through to a different, dream-like state, where the specific meanings of each line do not matter. He calibrates the play as a totality, presenting a complete visual and aural picture in which the pauses are as important as the words. We have to trust that vision.

When I first played Footfalls in 1991 I didn't really know what I was aiming for. But it's all much simpler than I thought. Once I had done it for an audience, I saw the extraordinary impact it had. It's such a wonderfully compassionate celebration of this woman's spirit, with a lot of humour too. Her incessant steps are mesmeric. She's trying to create her own art form from those steps, which are almost catatonic. People who have suffered a deep trauma often repeat actions in this way but here we don't know what has happened to her. Come and Go is also very simple - just three women sitting on a bench. It's so restful that the three of us almost fall asleep in rehearsal. We're learning to let go.

Alan Stanford (Waiting For Godot; Endgame)

Each time you come back to Beckett there's something new to learn. We've been playing this Godot for 11 years now and we've all grown older, of course, which means that we see aspects of it we couldn't have thought of before. It's a script about everything. When we started with Walter Asmus, he stuck close to Beckett's last production of it. Now he has changed his perception. Pozzo, for example, is completely different now. He used to be dominating; now he's clearly vulnerable and weak. For me, Beckett is the greatest playwright of the 20th century. He changed the form of theatre. You have to read his work with great care. He's about simplicity, about existential issues. In Godot you have the fundamental human experience of filling in time, while Endgame is a play about ending, asking `how do you finish?' It's a chronicle, showing how we all like to tell stories about ourselves, because this is how we will be remembered. That sounds very heavy, but we have had more laughs doing Endgame than almost any comedy. Antonio Liberi, who's directing, takes a very pure approach, returning to simple images, so that we stop trying so hard and just allow it to happen. I want to play Hamm for the rest of my life. The creativity we have as actors and directors is to take a work and examine it in a new way. The script is not the play. The play requires the contribution of everybody, in performance, and Beckett is helping us all the way.

The Gate's Beckett Festival runs at the Barbican, London, from tonight until September 18th. To book phone 0044-171-6388891