REA MAKES KRAPP’S LAST TAPE HIS OWN
It takes a VERY fine actor to bring something different to this Beckett play
Krapp’s Last Tape
Project Arts Centre Until Feb 3
On the surface, Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play is a typical example of his gloomy outlook on life. It has Krapp, now in his late sixties, sitting at a table playing tapes he has made in his past life, in particular one he made when he was 29. But listening to them doesn’t cheer him up. They just remind him of ‘that stupid bastard I took myself for 30 or 40 years ago’, mixed with a poignant sense of loss over happy experiences he didn’t develop.
The play doesn’t lend itself to expansive production possibilities, so it takes a really fine actor to give it a treatment that makes it stand out from previous productions. And this 20th anniversary Landmark production with Stephen Rea as Krapp, directed by Vicky Featherstone, is distinctly different in tone from others I have seen, although Rea has the requisite funereal, craggy look and doleful voice. Krapp here is not just some scruffy character; there’s even a slightly weathered element of style in his clothing.
And his walk is not the stumbling shuffle of an old man but of someone who still has some determination. There are comic clowning possibilities as Krapp prepares himself for his yearly bout of tape-listening, in particular the use of bananas for slapstick banana-skin humour. But here the comic element is treated briefly, not left lingering.
Krapp fiddles slowly with keys before opening his desk and laying out the tapes carefully. But his anger breaks out as he scatters them. This is a frustrated, selfhating man, haunted by the cherished but failed romantic possibilities of his youth and his failures as a writer: ‘Seventeen copies sold at half price and free to libraries’.
The past episodes of sexual activity are written and spoken in a particularly poetic and tender style that very movingly expose Krapp’s humanity and sense of failure. But, as he bitterly spits out, ‘That’s all done with’. Yet he still
Krapp’s fondness for alcohol and bananas has given him a bowel problem
‘The great thing about Beckett was that he didn’t try to sell philosophies’
likes playing with words, sounding out the feel and meaning of the words ‘spool’ and ‘viduity’.
Beckett’s early plays about miserable characters often baffled or annoyed audiences used to plays that had a beginning, a middle and an end. But he never went in for explanations about his work. ‘It means what it says’ he told a man who asked him what Waiting For Godot was actually about.
It’s an indication of Stephen Rea’s attitude to his work that, as he explains in a programme note, he decided to have the tapes recorded 12 years ago in case he should ever be called on to play Krapp. And it works beautifully: the voice on the tape has a distinctly different tone from his present voice.
Beckett’s plays can still have an appeal to people who can see themselves in characters like Krapp, hopeless but still trying to cope. And the humour is still there – even when Krapp snorts at his younger self’s resolution to give up drinking. His life-long fondness for alcohol and bananas has given him a bowel problem.
Harold Pinter neatly summed up Beckett as a writer: ‘The great thing about him was that that he didn’t try to sell philosophies or truths, or creeds or dogmas – nothing from the bargain basement… he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path. He’s the most courageous, remorseless writer.’
Beckett and Pinter endured rough criticism in their time – and something else they had in common, besides the Nobel Prize for literature, was a fondness for cricket.