IN HIS attempt to interrogate the meaningless of mankind's existence, Samuel Beckett, ironically, has helped many in their search for a reason to live.

This is not an exaggeration. To come into contact with the best of Beckett's work, when it is performed properly, is to meet up with something that is truly life-giving.

It is not that one has to be able to make sense of the words and phrases - indeed Beckett actively wanted his characters and creations to come up against a brick wall of misunderstanding - it is that one senses such a fundamental truth of meaning in his language, in his humour, that his work becomes the very opposite of bleak. Instead, one walks away from it on a kind of high.

The difficulty, of course, is that so much of Beckett's work, particularly his later plays, demand such rigorous attention, such intensity of concentration from performers and directors alike, that they are more often done badly, or at least half-heartedly, than they are done well. The task is a daunting one: Beckett's later works are so minimalist that they become, almost, a series of tableaux - a suspended head here, a frantically chattering mouth there - and the vital emotional bridges between audience and stage can often hang suspended in the air.

Certainly, feeling and emotion are firmly shut out from the first piece of theatre staged as part of Bedrock Production's Beckett's Ghosts (an evening of four Beckett plays) as Jason Byrne (artistic director of Loose Canon Theatre Company) directs Andrew Bennett to faithfully pronounce every word of A Piece of Monologue in a hushed, deadened monotone. Difficult as the play is for an actor to cope with - the speaker is required to stand still throughout, and Bennett does so admirably - an audience is surely not meant to watch it through gritted teeth, willing it to end. Although beautifully lit by Paul Keogan, this production aches for the might have been, lacking as it does any sense of the rhythms, texture and beauty of Beckett's words. The work, which begins, so wonderfully, and memorably, with the words: "Birth was the death of him. Again", focuses on the interminability of experience. I doubt if it was meant to be one.

A Piece of Monologue features a standing man, the Speaker, dimly lit and half in shade. That Time, directed here by Jimmy Fay (artistic director of Bedrock), cuts the character, this time the Listener, back to just a face, suspended in darkness above the ground. Fay has cast the work carefully, and admirably - Ned Dennehy, although he is required to do little save open and close his eyes, and smile once, at the end, has the kind of craggy, lived-in face that suggests a character replete with memories. Dennehy's pre-recorded voice swirls about him, and Fay has not been afraid to invest the piece with emotion: "Ah, for God's sake, " cries out the character, in frustration, "all gone long ago all dust."

The smile at the end, is revealing, almost menacing in its realisation that emptiness is all the character can expect from life.

Of the four productions, it is this work, and Breath, directed and designed by performance artist Amanda Coogan, which are the most successful. Coogan is brave enough to stamp her own interpretation onto the 40-second piece that is Breath; although Beckett directed that the stage be littered with unidentifiable rubbish, the pulled-back curtain in Project reveals a stage heaped with naked, twisted mannequins. The image is a striking one, and the piece has a definable impact, although it is more reflective of the concerns that inhabit Coogan's own work around the female body than anything Beckett himself intended. Nonetheless, if you believe that theatre is a living, breathing beast, open to change, then it is important to commend the integrity behind this production.

Completing the quartet is Not I, once again directed by Byrne, and once again beset with problems. Although Byrne has less difficulty with this piece, it is impossible to take it with the seriousness intended when not only the mouth, but also all of the speaker's chin, is revealed to the audience. Deirdre Roycroft plays Mouth, and although she captures some of the humour in the work, she does not manage to convey any of its necessary distress.

So the evening has its moments, but is not quite the visceral experience one imagines it could have been. And indeed, nowhere is Beckett more visceral and raw than in the work of Conor Lovett and Gare St Lazare Players, who reprised, among other works, Beckett's prose pieces Texts for Nothing, for the centenary festival. Lovett is the quintessential Beckett actor and is intimately associated with the writer's work. To watch him recite the Texts as a stammering, self-doubting, ironic discussion with himself is to be mesmerised for an hour and fulfilled for a day.