"First off, we probably used to think we were too young to do 'Waiting for Godot,' because it's sometimes uncomfortable talking like gnarled old men," 27-year-old Tasuku Emoto said during a recent Japan Times interview with him and his younger brother Tokio, 24, who will play the central roles in Tokyo Kandenchi's upcoming production of the absurdist masterpiece by Ireland's 1968 Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett.

"But there's actually no restriction on how to play it," he reflected, "as it's got such a huge capacity for everyone to see different meanings in it — though it's a very tough play to pull off."

Premiered in 1953 after being written in French by Beckett in 1948/49, "Waiting for Godot" — which the longtime Paris resident subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts" — was voted "the most significant English-language play of the 20th century" in a poll of 800 playwrights, actors, directors and critics by the Royal National Theatre in London in 1998.