Here we offer a translation of the article published on February 4 here in IrishTime, the Irish director of the cancelled play was mentioned.

A staging of En attendant godot in the Netherlands took a Beckettian turn when the theatre cancelled performances because the Irish director had only auditioned men for the all-male cast of characters.

"I would say with all my heart that my life in the last few weeks has become completely absurd," said Oisín Moyne, 24, from Donegal, who had hoped to make his directorial debut with Samuel Beckett's work on the irrationality of life.

The play, in which Vladimir and Estragon are sometimes joined by other male characters waiting for someone who never arrives, had been in rehearsal since November and was due to be performed at the University of Groningen's Usva student cultural centre in March.

But the performances were canceled after the center discovered that the casting call for the play's five male roles was restricted to...men, which the production team said went against the university's inclusion policy.

"If it was a play with five white people for which they had held open auditions, everything would have gone well. But you can't discriminate against people from the start," Bram Douwes, a theatre programmer at USVA, told the Ukrant newspaper.

A spokesman for the University of Groningen said times had changed since the play was first performed in 1953.

“[Beckett] explicitly stated that this play should be performed by five men. Times have changed. And the idea that only men are fit to play this role is outdated and even discriminatory,” said Elies Kouwenhoven, the university’s press officer. “As a university, we stand for an open and inclusive community where it is not appropriate to exclude others on any basis.”

Mr Moyne told the Irish Times that he had considered casting the roles as people of another sex, but was unable to do so because of rules established by the playwright before his death and maintained by Beckett's estate.

In 1988, Beckett sued a Dutch theatre company for choosing to cast women in this play, the best-known work of the Theatre of the Absurd movement. His heirs hold the rights to the work until 2059 and continue to oppose productions that deviate from Beckett's instructions.

Efforts have been made to challenge these restrictions – seen by some as increasingly archaic. In France, in 1991, a judge ruled that the play could be performed by an all-female cast at a festival in Avignon, but only if a letter of objection from the late playwright's representative was read out before each performance.

In late 2019, an Ohio college canceled an all-female production of the play, fearing legal action from Beckett’s estate. And in 2021, a nonbinary member of the British clown theater company Silent Faces staged Godot is a Woman, a play addressing the rules of genre around Beckett's work.

In the case of the Groningen production, the context was set out in the casting call which stated that " Unfortunately, no exceptions could be granted in this casting." And specified that it was linked to the heirs' desire to take legal action. The agency that manages the rights did not respond to our invitation at the time of publication.

The play's producer, Medeea Anton (24), said the cancellation decision overlooked the important role of the entire team outside of the actors in the production of the play.

“Although there was a restriction on the cast, which is only five people in this production, the rest of our production is predominantly female. We also have trans people, non-binary people, the majority of the production is made up of people from the LGBT community,” she said. “I tried to explain to them that this is a legal thing, and that we are a small amateur theatre company, and we can’t afford to get sued. But nothing I could say in the meeting could change their minds.”

Mr Moyne, who moved to Groningen to study physics and now works in the region, said it had been a "crazy" and stressful two weeks for everyone involved.

"I unfortunately had to tell my parents that the show might not happen, even though they had planned to fly in. A friend from home who I haven't seen in a long time is visiting town and was supposed to see the play, and I had to tell her that it wasn't going to happen," he said.

He expressed hope that the cultural centre would use the freed-up performance slots to host an event to promote inclusion in theatre, and that they were now looking for a performance venue so that rehearsals would not be lost.

"A few members of the cast and crew have already made this joke: we are all waiting for Godot now."