It’s playback time for one old codger
Krapp’s Last Tape (Leeds Playhouse) Verdict: Buggy has Beckett taped ★★★II Dr Blood’s Travelling Show (touring; imitatingthedog.co.uk) Verdict: Schlock horror in the car park ★★★II
SAY a prayer for Leeds Playhouse. After opening last year following a £16 million makeover, they ran straight into lockdown. And just when they thought it was safe to come out of hibernation, they may yet run into Boris’s traffic lights.
With a little bit of luck, however, their autumn season will keep running, starting with the wonderful Irish actor Niall Buggy.
He’s gently warming the theatre’s gaskets in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape — a short sketch about a 69-year- old codger listening to audio tapes made by his 39-year-old self. My wife refuses to go near the half-hour play, which she judges to be 30 minutes too long.
I, however, am more forgiving of its slender pleasures and its pursuit of what the characteristically sardonic Beckett calls ‘unattainable happiness’. The play chimes with the mood of our times almost too well. Staged in a below- stairs bunker, Dominic Hill’s production has the atmosphere of a secret police interrogation room. Some amusement is created by the Minion-like squeal of tape spools, rage is directed at biscuit tins housing Krapp’s old recordings, and there is small entertainment with a discarded banana skin.
It may not sound like a bundle of fun, but Buggy finds flecks of affection in a play that’s as autobiographical as Beckett gets — scoffing at his literary ambition, ruing lost love and trying to master a weakness for bananas.
Buggy — defiant in his misbuttoned cardie, stained trousers and carpet slippers — is a jaundiced old bugger, taking solace in his misery. ‘ The best years are gone,’ he snarls, ‘ and I wouldn’t want them back.’ Between temperature checks, masks and carefully monitored social distancing, at least the show feels safe, if not joyful.
If you want something warmer this winter, keep your fingers crossed for Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (Imelda Staunton and Maxine Peake, taking their Bridge Theatre monologues on tour) next month; and A Christmas Carol in December.
More boisterously, the Playhouse have also co-produced Dr Blood’s old Travelling Show: a macabre and gleefully bizarre car park production being staged at Salford’s Lowry before heading to Lancaster Arts and Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre.
Also clocking in at 30 minutes, it’s a fairgroundstyle show about smalltime crooks planning to abduct the mayor from the town hall for nefarious purposes. Audience positions are marked out with football training cones — which feels like we are all being lined up for an identity parade. Imitating The Dog, the company producing the show, are the academic punks who lovingly recreated the schlock horror film Night of The Living Dead at Leeds Playhouse last year.
Dr Blood is more subversive, with our chief villain (Matt Prendergast), got up in a leather jacket, latex head mask and a Boris wig, relishing the prospect of bloodshed and the fleshy delights of his female accomplice.
It’s cleverly done, with edgy music ( including from legendary Leeds punk band Gang of Four) and video projections, plus live action puppetry using Ken and Barbie dolls.
I was amused by our revolting crims having a dinky-sized evoque Land rover as their getaway vehicle. And it has all the sophistication of a car boot sale but, hey, at least it’s happening.