Playing the fool

There's a line in Samuel Beckett's Endgame where Hamm turns to Clov and says: 'We're not beginning to... to... mean something?' Lee Evans laughs at that line. 'I have similar conversations at home with my wife,' he says. 'She would say: "You? Mean something?"'

Evans has probably been quoting a lot of Beckett at home recently. Next week he opens as Clov opposite Michael Gambon's Hamm in the West End. It's not just an unlikely pairing, it's a potentially inspired piece of casting. Think of Evans's stand-up: the elastic clown who is afraid to stop moving, obsessed with his own idiocy. It's existentialism for the everyman, the fool inside us all made grotesque.

'My comedy is about nothing,' says Evans. 'I do it because I feel less inadequate on stage moving about than I do off stage standing still.'

Which is just as well, since Clov is the only character in Endgame who can move. Or rather, the only character who can't really be still. Clov can't sit down, Hamm (Clov's master) can't stand up, while Hamm's aged parents, stuck in two dustbins, can't do much of either.

Hamm needs Clov because he is blind; Clov needs Hamm because he doesn't know the combination for the pantry. Together they are locked in a relationship of absolute dependency, while outside the world is ending. 'Oh, it's mad stuff, isn't it!' howls Evans. 'I love Beckett.

He lets you find the meaning in things for yourself.'

This is the first time he has ever done any straight theatre, although years ago he and Frank Skinner considered taking Waiting For Godot to Edinburgh before deciding against it. 'We thought that would be a bit intense, since Edinburgh is such a piss-up, so I took some stand-up instead,' he says.

Since then he's won the Perrier Award, become one of the country's best-loved comics and cracked Hollywood. And in the autumn, he will appear in the Broadway transfer of The Producers.

But first it's Beckett in the West End, before the very same critics who slammed his first West End stand-up show in 1996. 'Endgame has a definite association with my life,' says Evans. 'I see Hamm as The Establishment and me as the monkey boy who comes out with dribble and banality.

I'm the idiot on the outside; I've always been told that, so I know it's true. It makes me struggle more, makes me get out of bed. But I don't ever want to join The Establishment. Once you're inside, you're f***ed.'

Evans insists on this notion of himself as the pleb The Establishment never understands. It's hard to tell whether he is genuinely this humble, or whether Evans the idiot has become a selffulfilling prophecy, a persona for him to hide behind and relentlessly promote. 'It's my job to upset the equilibrium,' is all he will say.