In Krapp’s Last Tape monologue, eight or nine pages if one counts Samuel Beckett’s fulsome stage directions spread over fifty-five minutes, everything happens and nothing happens. It’s a musical score played by many actors (and directors) over the years—over time, which is what it’s about.
I have seen several, the original Krapp Patrick Magee (on film only), whose voice appealed to Beckett when he heard him on the radio in 1957, John Hurt, Harold Pinter (whom I reviewed for Plays International), Robert Wilson’s idiosyncratic expressionistic version.
We all have our preferences. Even Krapp, who seems to hate his younger self’s voice. Written in 1958, when tape recorders were a novelty to Beckett… maybe “spool” was a new word, which he has Krapp swill around his mouth.
And what a coincidence… we have Gary Oldman in York and Stephen Rea in London for a few days only. Go compare. Rea had the presence of mind to record his younger self twelve years ago on tape in the hope he would be asked to take on the role. It has come to pass. He and director Vicky Featherstone are a comfortable partnership, having worked together some years ago on David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue.
Featherstone has chosen her supporting creative team with care. Jamie Vartan’s minimalist set (on the Barbican’s vast main stage) is contained beautifully by Paul Keogan’s geometric lighting design, pure abstract expressionism. Under a dim spot at a rectangular table sits a weary man, lined face, fingers bent, gait plodding in his heavy white boots (costume designer Katie Davenport).
The light becomes brighter—we can see his pained expression. What is on his mind? Time is on his mind. “A late evening in the future” is the first line of the stage directions. Interpret that as you will... His tapes are on his mind. One a year, a record of his life, which brings him no joy, only the ache of what he has lost or rather thrown away...
Now a curmudgeonly sixty-nine, he listens to one he made thirty years ago in which he references another one he made earlier about a lost love, his mother’s death and so on. Three time capsules… for he is about to make his last one, but gives up after listening and re-listening to the one that means the most to him.
If you read James Knowlson’s magisterial The Life of Samuel Beckett, you will find that the reminiscences are drawn from his own life, the girl in the punt (Ethna MacCarthy and her eyes), Peggy Sinclair the girl in the green coat, which makes it all the more poignant. Apparently, he was fond of this play "like a clucky hen".
Was Beckett thinking of T S Elliot’s “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.”? Written when Beckett (1906–1989) was only fifty-two, was he anticipating his own future? He had a long wait. And he saw the bleakly funny side of it… the banana routine is straight out of music hall.
A side drawer—as long as the rectangular table—under lock and key is opened with a semblance of reverence. Two bananas are amongst the fresh tape. He eats them with relish bordering on addiction, throws the peel away and inevitably almost skids on one.
He exits several times—for that addictive Dutch courage drink in his lonely solitary life? Sound designer Kevin Gleeson comes into his own here. Krapp seems to be gone for quite some time—how to keep our attention and anticipation… We hang on every sound and move.
As well as the personal, poetry, art and music all fed into his work. He read four languages, was well versed in European literature, loved Balzac and Joyce (had been his amanuensis)—what a mixture. Theodor Fontane’s 1895 Effi Briest is in the text, but do we pick it up in the hanging silences? What does a modern audience bring to it? There is respectful silence and the occasional titter.
I think sixty-nine-year-olds don't shuffle like that—these days sixty is the new fifty—but Stephen Rea is seventy-eight and I bet he doesn't shuffle like that or mumble like that. I’m glad to get away. The weight of misery, disappointment, regret... And self-deception—the last lines are, “no, I wouldn't want them back.” As if…