With Proust's The Remembrance Of Things Past, Joyce's Ulysses and Kafka's greatest hits, Beckett's Trilogy dominates 20th-Century literature.

What you realise from this incredible one-man adaptation by Ireland's Gare St Lazare is it also lies at the core of most 20th-Century comedy.

In these three monologues you can find the prototype for Eddie Izzard's curious imaginative leaps, the everyday surrealism of Father Ted and verification for anyone who ever argued black humour is best.

There is also a wonderfully rebellious yarn involving human bowel movements and the Times Literary Supplement.

Although Beckett is most associated with Waiting For Godot, his fiction has its own innate dramatic power.

On a bare stage, stationary in a drab grey overcoat, Conor Lovett channelled this with such casual brilliance I remained gripped throughout the initially daunting three hours.

Best received was opener Molloy, in which the protagonist discussed the difficulties of digging a grave for a dog when one of your legs is sick and used mathematics to determine that he wasn't in fact a big farter - 315 times in 19 hours may sound like a lot, but when you break it down that's really only one every four minutes.

I was equally captivated by Malone Dies, in which a dying man attempts to pass the time by telling himself stories. A novel which breaks down depressingly on the page, on stage it built to a feverish flight of fancy as Malone's variously damaged creations went on a day trip from the asylum.

With his constant revisions and repetitions, hesitations and sentences left hanging, Beckett must be an absolute bugger to memorise.

On Sunday, Lovett also had to contend with a bust spotlight, the tech staff's leaking walky-talkies and the "multimedia happening" hosted by the neighbouring Corn Exchange.

Of course, he rose above it all with commendable professionalism.

But it's hard to appreciate the momentous insignificance of a rattling consciousness seeking hopelessly for silence (see final part, The Unnameable) when the very walls are vibrating to an incessant techno thud.

Beckett may have been the father of 20th-Century humour but if the Pavilion Theatre can't sort out their soundproofing they should stick to hosting stand-up.