Passe Muraille looks back, but moves forward
Krapp’s Last Tape
(out of 4) By Samuel Beckett, directed by Mac Fyfe. Until Jan. 28 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. passemuraille.ca or 416-504-7529 The choice of Beckett’s famed monologue, first performed onstage in 1958, is an unexpected one to launch celebrations of Theatre Passe Muraille’s 50th anniversary. One of the bastions of the country’s alternative theatre movement, Passe Muraille was founded to produce new Canadian plays and foster a distinctively Canadian voice for theatre.
Staging a canonical work by an Irish author therefore seems an off-beat move, but then again, breaking down preconceptions (thinking beyond the walls, as its name suggests) is also in Passe Muraille’s DNA. And this is, fittingly, a play about birthday rituals: in it, a 69-year-old man listens back to a tape of himself speaking 30 years earlier and attempts to make a new recording, as he does every year.
The young radicals who started the theatre are now mostly older than Krapp, and producing this memory play now seems a gesture of respect and recognition of them.
Bob Nasmith is one of those iconoclastic members of the original Passe Muraille company and his presence in the title role adds to this sense of the production being offered as a living memorial of his generation’s contributions — and vital evidence that there’s life in the old dog yet. Under Mac Fyfe’s direction, Nasmith’s performance is pitch-perfect, capturing the layers of regret, bemused selfloathing and stubborn resilience that make up the character.
Beckett’s famously prescriptive stage directions create clear parameters for productions, from the costume (tattered vest and too-short trousers, dirty open-necked shirt, oversized white boots) to the setting: a table on which sits an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder. Angela Thomas and Chris Clifford’s designs ably meet these expectations and the lighting, also designed by Clifford, helps create the sense of isolation that so defines the play; Nasmith is captured in a warm bath of yellow light, but outside it is all darkness.
The design marvel here is Andrew Dollar’s sound (supported by Richard Feren as sound consultant); the cues are perfectly timed and Krapp’s recorded voice really seems to come from the old-fashioned tape, though I have to believe it’s coming from another sound source. Getting this aspect right is essential to the play’s effectiveness and Fyfe’s team nails it.
Nasmith and Fyfe are also closely associated with Video-Cabaret, and some of that company’s exaggerated performance style and hints of its design esthetic are laced in here too (it is one of the production’s supporters along with Wily Pig and Passe Muraille itself ).
Beckett’s stage direction that Krapp has a “white face” (a VideoCab signature) has been taken quite literally here and the “purple nose” called for in the script here looks red, underlining the clownish aspects of a character who literally slips on a banana peel in the play’s wordless opening sequence.
Nasmith has a great capacity for stillness onstage and his wide-open eyes as he stares out at the audience are full of pathos; the weight of his experiences and his regrets fill the small auditorium of the Passe Muraille Backspace. He plays Krapp’s tiny moments of delight and discovery — mouthing the word “spool,” looking up the word “viduity” in a giant dictionary — with genuineness. The production allows the sad message behind those moments — that they’re the only joys he has left — to come through on its own terms, without banging it home.
His voice is clear and resonant, and shifts appropriately, crackling with age in the present, more bombastic on the old recording.
“Perhaps my best years are gone,” Krapp concludes.
It’s his last tape, after all. Happily this is not the last round for Passe Muraille. The anniversary celebrations continue with world premieres of Canadian work and the tantalizing prospect of director Nina Lee Aquino bringing her perspective to one of the theatre’s well-known works, The Drawer Boy.
The combination of artists here of older and younger generations (Fyfe and Claire Burns, who produced this show with Nasmith under the banner of the startup Singing Swan Productions) sends a clear message that Passe Muraille is moving forward while remaining connected to its past. Tickets are going fast for this short run.