One night in 1953, the French actor Jean Martin saw a tall, thin man in the second row of the Babylone theatre, where he was rehearsing in the first production of Waiting for Godot. "Do you want me to tell you how it came about?" Martin, who is now 76, asks with a twinkle in his eye. "Anyway, you have to believe me - because the rest of us are all dead."
Martin played Lucky, the slave-porter who plods through life at the end of a rope and colludes with his master in his own mistreatment. The man with the eagle eye in the second row was Samuel Beckett, then 46. "He had incredible presence, but he was very, very reserved," Martin recalls. "He didn't say a word. When you saw him, you were fascinated."
Beckett and his companion, Suzanne Dumesnil-Deschevaux, would become close friends of Jean Martin. Suzanne, 10 years' older than Beckett, bullied publishers to read his work and cooked and cleaned for the writer. They would marry in old age, not long before Suzanne's death. "She was completely different from him," Martin says. "She never drank a drop. Sam was very driven - her not at all. It created a kind of balance."
It was Suzanne who took the manuscript of Godot to the theatre director and actor Roger Blin. For six months, he scrabbled for enough money and a location to produce it. When another actor quit two weeks before the opening, Blin asked Martin to play Lucky. At first, Martin thought it wasn't much of a part.
The character's only spoken sequence is a long, incomprehensible monologue when his tormentor Pozzo forces him to "think out loud" to entertain Vladimir and Estragon.
"I didn't know what to do with Lucky," Martin says. A doctor friend suggested he observe patients suffering from Parkinson's disease. Recounting it these 46 years later, Martin stands up and his right hand begins to tremble, then the shaking takes over his whole body as he tries to force out the words. When Martin asked Beckett if he approved of the technique, the writer just shrugged.
The last rehearsal of Godot was attended by the female dresser and her boyfriend, a rubbish collector who provided a cast-off suitcase as Lucky's main prop. "They were the first ones in the world to see it, and they must have been bored to death," Martin laughs. "But when I arrived onstage she noticed I was shaking and that I was carrying the suitcase. At the end of the monologue she started to vomit. Sam said, `If that's the effect it has, then that's the way you must play it' ."
"In his life, Sam never saw one of his plays performed in front of an audience," Martin says. "Never. When you asked him why, he said `aghhhh' . . . and waved his hand. I think somehow it would have embarrassed him. He was fundamentally shy. And he knew there would be a gap between the way he imagined it and the way it happened."
Le Figaro published a front-page opinion piece by the playwright Jean Anouilh entitled "Pascal's Pensees played by the Fratellini" (a family of clowns) and hailing Godot as a masterpiece. Upper middle-class Paris flocked to the tiny theatre where Martin would play Lucky 250 times. The audience was never quite sure how to react. "At the end of the first act, some of them would yell `bravo, bravo'. Others just looked at each other."
Within six months, Godot was famous the world over. Its notoriety brought Beckett unexpected wealth, much of which he gave to friends and struggling artists. "Several times in Godot the characters say, `We're bored', and the audience used to shout back, `yeah, we are too!', " Martin laughs. So why was the play so successful? "Before Godot, Blin and I acted in a half dozen plays by Ionesco and Adamov, and no one came," Martin says. "I thought the public were stupid. But when we did Godot, I thought they were just as stupid. It was pure snobbery, because you couldn't join in dinner party conversation if you hadn't seen it. People spent hours discussing whether Godot was meant to be God . . ."
After Godot, Beckett wrote End Game for Martin and Blin. "We had the same problems as we did with Godot. People said, `It's a miracle that won't be repeated'." Martin was banned from acting in France because he signed a petition against the war in Algeria. He went on to play the French colonel in Pontecorvo's dramatic, pro-Algerian film The Battle of Algiers, which "didn't help the situation". So he acted in Hollywood westerns with Henry Fonda before returning to France.
Through it all, Martin remained close to Samuel and Suzanne Beckett, visiting them at their home in the Marne Valley and accompanying them to Yugoslavia on holiday, to spend royalties that couldn't be taken out of the communist country. Martin keeps a manuscript he wrote there, about his father's death. Beckett told him to leave the pages on the left blank, and each night the Nobel prize winner wrote his own version of Martin's text on the opposite page.
When Suzanne was 90 and growing senile, she could no longer look after him. He stopped eating and had to be taken to an old people's home in Montparnasse. Two weeks before Beckett died in December 1989, Martin visited him for the last time. "He hated unexpected visitors - he wanted to be shaved and dressed - so I dropped a note off in the afternoon. When I arrived that evening, there was a bottle of Powers and two glasses on the table."
Both men had fought in the French resistance during the second World War, but they never talked about it. "He wasn't the type to tell his life story," Martin says. "We talked about people we'd seen, people we loved, what we read, painting. He was completely different from what people imagined - Sam was someone you had a good time with."