Everything is perfectly realized in the world of the Gate Theatre Dublin’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” at the Skirball Center. The troupe is working in its comfort zone (having toured this same production to New York in 1996), with actors well rutted into their roles, and a director (Walter D. Asmus) who once worked for the great Sam himself. The production is seamless and occasionally elegant, and the lobby talk at intermission kept throwing up the word “definitive.”

But definitive here means “resolutely unsurprising.”

When Beckett started scaring the pants off mid-century critics and audiences, it was because he talked matter-of-factly about the void. He peeled the big onion of theater, stripping away the skin of character, plot, and prosaic notions of “sense” to discover the emptiness at its heart. “Godot,” of course, has plenty of heart — from the sweet old clowns who love each other too much to die at different times to the absent Godot’s apparent hold on his subjects. But life itself, the play says, is just the slow-motion drop from our mother’s laps into the grave.

Now, though, that hand on the back of your neck isn’t just gravity pushing you to your end. It’s also the weighty control of the Beckett estate and the paralyzing forces of copyright. Much has been made of Beckett’s (and Beckett’s factotums’) desire to keep his work pristine:

stage directions shan’t be mere suggestions, and set-designers can’t frivolously add another boulder. When, in the 1980s, JoAnne Akalaitis set “Endgame” in a post-apocalyptic subway car, the estate’s reason for not shutting it down was a sniffy desire not to make it into a cause célèbre. They have muffled others, however, for playing fast and loose with the sacred texts — it’s hard to shake the image of a big brother sitting on his little brother’s head.

Dublin’s Gate Theater has done its own share of stifling — last year Peter Hall complained that the Gate and the Barbican had sewn up the rights to produce Beckett for his centennial, leaving all other applicants out in the chill.

In a sad way, the Beckett “faithful” — his estate, his minders — have lost themselves on a plain just like Didi and Gogo’s. If they can just wait long enough, and stay in exactly the same spot, then their Godot will come.

All this respect goes a long way toward damping the sparks of this estimable production. There’s a bit of anti-England sentiment in the domineering and plummy Pozzo (Alan Stanford), which actually makes him a solid delight, and Lucky’s first act tirade spirals out of Stephen Brennan like air from a punctured balloon. But while the play shows no signs of dating itself — he could be writing today — it has lost, for the moment, its air of transgression. Ah, well, Didi and Gogo offer us a lesson for this as well. If your shoes (or the hagiographic productions of an artist) are paining you, just take them off for a while. Perhaps tomorrow (or in 50 years), someone will have left you a production that fits.

Until October 28 (566 La Guardia Place at West 3rd Street, 212-992-8484).