The Samuel Beckett play 'Waiting for Godot' will be performed in intimate surroundings at Rock Island Coffee Shop, just as the sun slides below the horizon.

The play, which is being performed in the Reid Street, Hamilton caf? opens tonight and runs to August 26.

Waterspout Productions director John Zuill said coffeehouse is an intimate venue, seating up to 50 people for a previous production.

"It doesn't seat very many, but people like the outside," he said, "We have the stage up against the coffee roaster doors.

"It is a little play and we think it is going to be good."

The other two plays that Waterspout Productions put on at Rock Island were 'Julius Caesar' and 'The Man'.

Mr. Zuill said the play, 'Waiting for Godot', has been a mainstay of the experimental theatre scene.

"I suppose it is a play about hope. It is about all the things that confound one's need to hope for.

"It puts these two people in a position, in which it is not without hope, but it is just indifferent ? in the way nature is I suppose or nature or the city if you like.

"And then they have to invent lives of their own and that is a very difficult thing to do. "Plus they have all the foibles that human beings have. They don't co-operate, they have misunderstandings, and all the things that aren't supposed to happen to people in stories or in real plays is happening to them.

"All the little things in life that annoy or piss you off and in which movie stars never seem to endure happen to these guys."

Mr. Zuill added that it very much relates to Samuel Beckett's career.

"He was very much into the silent-movie era, even though this was written in the sound era," he said.

"It is sort of the way you can image that an actor sort of has to make himself appear on stage. He can't use his voice or his charisma so he has to inflect the space as it were and put his personality out through the screen.

"I think that is what appealed to Beckett about it."

He added that the author had the cast wearing bowler hats, where in the 1940s, no one wore bowler hats.

"But he uses bowler hats as a way of indicating the personality and how interchangeable it is," he said.

"It is a very funny play, but it is also brings you right to the abyss and you can have a nice look down."

Mr. Zuill said he always thought it was a very beautiful play, "because it is so wild and strange", but remembering the first time he saw it he said: "I was astounded. I understand the two characters and I believe in them.

"But I wasn't the one who picked it. It was Andrew Bacon and when he played Romeo in the Shakespearean play, he wanted to do it.

"So I sort of thought, well okay and here we are."

He said he probably would have chosen some of Beckett's shorter plays which, he said, were "much stranger", but did not know how well they would have gone over.

He said often the play gets done too seriously and the audience walks away thinking what intellectual drudgery that was.

"So we are definitely making it human and accessible," he said, "And sometimes things get very dark, but even in its darkest moments its very funny."

During intermission patrons can enjoy not coffee, but wine as per usual.