When you have to rearrange your outside life - people worrying about their lack of money and all those kinds of things - it can't not have an effect on your inside life. The ground is shifting - for some dramatically, for others subtly - underneath our feet. 'It's perfect timing to do it here because many individuals are affected by what's happening in the world with economics. 'It speaks to us in extremis,' says Sean Mathias, director of the new UK production. There is no drama more stripped down and essential than Godot, whose mysteries Beckett refused to elucidate beyond 'the laughter and the tears'. It is a moment for introspection and stripping down to bare essentials. Consumerism is on the retreat, and the acquisition of material objects is a dead end. Where there was certainty, there is now doubt and angst. Another towering human structure, capitalism, is trembling at the foundations.

'The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.' But it is also funny and poetic, and reveals humanity's talents for stoicism, companionship and keeping going. As a modernist existential meditation it can at first appear bleak: 'They give birth astride of a grave,' says Pozzo. Waiting for Godot seems to have a unique resonance during times of social and political crisis. Man on Wire, the Oscar-winning documentary about Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between New York's Twin Towers in 1974, has been described as the most powerful 9/11 film yet made, precisely because it does not mention 9/11. But often the most eloquent response is the most indirect. Does theatre have a purpose when the world's financial system is in downturn, or rather recession, or rather depression? There may be a play to come that will dissect the avarice, incompetence and structural causes of the malaise.

Samuel becketts waiting for