Bill Irwin performs his one-man show 'On Beckett' at the Shakespeare Theatre Company through March 15. Irwin won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his 2005 performance in 'Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Photo by Larry Dortch courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre Company

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Bill Irwin, a Ringling Brothers-trained clown and Tony Award-winning actor, has long been drawn to the works of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. With his one-man creation On Beckett, he draws you into that magic circle too.

In his current venue at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Irwin delivers a funny, engaging and deeply personal exploration that relies as much on clowning slapstick as it does on analysis of scenes and even lines of Beckett’s absurdist, often bleak plays. Some have called this production, which debuted at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre eight years ago, a master class or lecture. But the performance is warmer and more intimate than that, as if you’re being entertained by a funny, thoughtful dinner guest.

On an austere stage with only a podium and platform, Irwin lays down the ground rules and greets the audience with partial lights up. He invites us to become a part of his experiment, in which he alternates between recitations of Beckett’s works and his own musings.

In the first half of the show, Irwin performs from Texts for Nothing and The Unnamable, including: “I say to the body, ‘Up with you now,’ and I can feel it struggling, like an old hack foundered in the street, struggling no more, struggling again, till it gives up.”

Beckett’s narrator finds movement nearly impossible. Meanwhile, our guide, fresh-faced Irwin, looks and moves years younger than 75. He takes the onslaught of Sisyphean speech and punctuates it with a gesture or a stomp. He underscores the humor with shifts in tone, wry expressions and awkward postures.

Irwin speaks his lines with a slight Irish accent, although, as he tells us, the Irish Beckett wrote in French and translated his work into English. Irwin marvels at that unwieldy artistic process and confides how memorization brings the actor into intimate contact with language. Irwin’s commentary must be every bit as memorized as the Beckett excerpts, but he delivers it in a conversational, easygoing manner.

Plenty of physical comedy

Between bouts of Beckett, Irwin shares his connection to the work, including a frigid study-abroad visit to Northern Ireland. Beckett had a connection to slapstick through regular childhood visits to Dublin’s vaudevillian variety theater. Clowns, as Irwin demonstrates, distract and amuse with slides and stumbles that upend the reliable expectation of movement.

With an equal mix of skill and wide-eyed confusion, Irwin treats us to an old clowning bit when he repeatedly swings and misses an invisible golf ball. In his goofy persistence, the audience sees not only Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton but also Beckett’s befuddled strivers.

Costumes create a mood

Beckett has dictated precise and strict stage directions, about which his estate is unforgiving. Characters Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, for example, are required to wear bowler hats. While the bowler may carry additional symbolism within the play, Irwin notes that the hats would also have been familiar to Beckett in his youth around Dublin in the early 20th century. Irwin dons and removes multiple bowlers, highlighting another similarity between clowning and Beckett, and he toys with the notion of how another hat might change the meaning of a Beckett play.

Of course, Beckett never wrote anything about clown pants. Over the course of this performance, though, Irwin marks phases by pulling on pairs of increasingly voluminous clown pants. Through his posture and exaggerated movements, Irwin uses the loose clothing to relieve or, in other instances, underline the confinement of Beckett’s characters (courtesy of costume consultant Martha Hally).

The main event: Godot

The second part of the performance dives into Beckett’s most popular work, Waiting for Godot. Irwin has performed in that play more than once, notably on Broadway with Nathan Lane, John Goodman and John Glover in 2009. Irwin describes a transatlantic rift — the pronunciation of “Godot” in the States as compared to the UK.

Irwin diagrams the case for a political Beckett — while sliding on a pair of oversized shoes to complement his baggy trousers — before launching into the downtrodden Lucky’s famous climactic monologue.

Irwin’s analysis of language is exciting, for example, when he breaks down the tragic implications of a single shift of “us” to “me” in two lines in this play where, as he puts it, “nothing happens twice.”

The performance flows cheerfully, not just through Irwin’s masterful acting and seamless comedy, but also aided by his explicit verbal cues, such as “now we are at the point.” These prompts are helpful in a performance that lacks the scenes that would normally set the pace of a play. It’s always longer to travel somewhere when you’ve never been there before.

Other team members behind this successful man include sound designer M. Florian Staab, tour production manager Lunar Eclipse Productions, tour lighting supervisor Avery Reagan, tour audio supervisor Alex Brock, tour producer Bryan Hunt, and production stage managers Lisa McGinn and Natalie Hratko.

This funny and insightful peek into the language of a complex playwright leaves fans and newcomers eager to experience more.

The play, with a run time of 90 minutes without intermission, runs through March 15 at the Michael R. Klein Theatre at the Lansburgh, 450 7th St. NW, Washington, DC. Tickets range from $39 to $120. People over age 60 receive a 10% discount or a 35% discount for Wednesday noon matinees. For tickets, visit shakespearetheatre.org or call the box office at (202) 547-1122.