The uniqueness of Beckett and his work is not difficult to explain, but neither is it easy to persuade a general public - conditioned by relentless consumer advertising and a massive public relations industry - to think about what he really has to say. Since 1945, Britain has increasingly become a secular society where the aforementioned conditioning - driven by consumer interests and the media - has replaced the earlier dominance of the church. Before the Second World War, most people believed what hey were told to believe and to accept without question their arrival in the world, whatever living it entailed, and their departure into another one - never defined.

Samuel Beckett grew up in that pre-war society and he had to hide his thoughts behind philosophical novels that were eccentric, funny and little read. The first was banned in his native Ireland because of the title, More Pricks than Kicks, although the subversive nature of its content and its successors Murphy and Watt - would have given more reason. Thereafter, while still employing the same graveyard humour, irony and originality that had become his hallmark, Beckett burst out into a new literature that ferociously protested at the cruelty of Human destiny and the way that humanity treats its own species. This change is particularly evident in Beckett's two major works of the late 1940's - the novel Molloy and the play Waiting for Godot. Beckett's unique worldview, the power of his language and his ironic humour are what attract people to his prose and plays. His message is clear. Our lives are short and brutal, mostly characterised by pain and unhappiness, except perhaps for brief episodes of pleasure. The most intense of these is sexual fulfilment, which has only one purpose - to bring another suffering generation into the world.

Not since Shakespeare has any writer been able to marry such depth of poetic utterance and imaginative literary creation. One needs courage to realise the full import of what Beckett is saying about the tragedy of life, but paradoxically, he gives such courage to those who come into contact with his work. For those who are open to it, art can become a reason to live, even though life is rationally not worth living. For others, it is the pursuit of wealth or the identification with a cause or an interest, however trivial, that, for a while, pushes away the knowledge that death is never far, and with it the extinction

His sharpest barbs are aimed at received religion, but his attacks are brilliantly and originally employed. They come to us through his invented personalities, many of whom have great similarities with their inventor. All of the characters in the Beckett canon are more or less conventional believers, taking religion as much for granted as did the family in which young Sam grew up. This enabled the author, through the comments and speculations of his invented personalities, to explore the absurdities of the Bible from Genesis onward, even entering the mind of the biblical God and taking the logic of what is believed to its many logical and absurd conclusions.

Belief does not mean liking, much less loving. The God that could make such a cruel world and such a misguided species as ours is not treated with respect but as a psychopathic criminal. The influence of Schopenhauer - the philosopher who most made an impression on Beckett - is evident in the esteemed thinker's two greatest insights: that one is far luckier never to have been born, and that all progress is the work of a malign Will that relentlessly strives for growth and pitilessly drives all creation forward. Nietzsche saw Man taking over from God, Shaw saw Man as moving towards one day becoming God himself, but to Beckett, the whole of creation was one great cosmic mistake and the extinction of the species, the possibility of which is mentioned in Rough for Theatre II, would hardly be a tragedy as it would, temporarily at least, bring pain to an end.

Beckett was steeped in protestant Christianity as a boy at home in Foxrock, Ireland, and at school in Ulster. What remained with him and emerges in so much of his work is Jesus as a crucified symbol of suffering humanity, undergoing a terrible death. Beckett was born on a Good Friday the thirteenth, the day when that awful death is celebrated and this certainly had a dramatic effect on him. He often refers to the crucifixion, and the number thirteen always has special resonance wherever it appears. Not for nothing is Beckett often called "a Christ-haunted man".

Life has many ways of crucifying us and all of Beckett's characters have their own Calvary. Audiences often recognise situations they know sometimes applicable to themselves, in the tragic personages that Beckett puts on stage - not to be pitied but to be understood. Their problems can be relieved, sometimes through companionship, but most of the time a problem's resolution fails because of human folly, some sudden impulse or unexpected accident. The unexpected will always happen, but it is not in our nature to be prepared. Just as he sends up the absurdities of religion, so too does Beckett make nonsense of the pretensions of a society that tells us that things are good and will get better - that we must not concern ourselves with anything too serious and that what we most fear will never happen.

Above all, Beckett is a moral realist. Good people are happier than bad ones and goodness comes from the willingness to understand others, to share, to comfort, to expect little and to give what we can. It is not an attitude preached by many in a society where selfishness is encouraged, pretentiousness admired and where "dumbing-down" can prevent us from seeing and from thinking about the many evils that poison the world. But the reaction of audiences to Beckett's plays when they are properly performed, and of readers to his other literary work, has revealed a hunger for reality and truth that revolts against consumerism and trivia peddling. The importance of Beckett lies in the power of his art - its ability to make us more compassionate and willing to share, to be good companions to others less fortunate than ourselves, and better human beings. In the words of Waiting for Godot's Vladimir, "Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!"