Theatre: Krapp’s Last Tape
Nicholas Lezard
One or two good things have come out of the coronavirus. One of them is that you can get to see this production online, for a miserly (when you consider the cost of a theatre ticket) £7.99. (Digital Theatre has many other productions available, and you can take out a subscription of £9.99 a month to see them all.)
I’d wanted not only to see this production but also to review it here. However, it ran for only three weeks or so at the Jermyn Street Theatre, and by the time you’d read about it you wouldn’t have been able to see it. But now you can.
Krapp’s Last Tape, first performed in 1958, is Beckett’s most personal play. Unlike Waiting for Godot and Endgame, it does not explicitly mention the philosophical travails of the very fact of being alive. Instead, it implies and enacts them. In Godot and Endgame, the space beyond the stage is suggested, as characters either peer into the auditorium or look out of the windows; here, there is no outside; the crushing dimension is time.
What we have, for those unfamiliar with the work, is an old man (not extremely old; the internal chronology of the play suggests a man in his sixties), who has been recording his diaries on tape. He listens to earlier entries and then makes new recordings, a scornful repudiation of the young man he was.
The younger self records love, and inspiration. The Krapp on stage is hollowed out. He is, we are strongly led to believe, a vision of the person Beckett would have become had he never become successful; a future that, until only too recently, had seemed hugely plausible. But it is more complex and universal than that, beneath its apparent simplicity.
Thanks to the stern vigilance of the Beckett Estate, the director of a play by Beckett is subject to strict constraints; so Trevor Nunn’s options when it comes to putting his own stamp on proceedings are limited. At one point, Krapp crosses himself, and I’m not sure that’s in the original stage directions.
But what we have here is unimpeachable. James Hayes’s Krapp is spot-on, recalling visually Patrick Magee’s definitive interpretation (Beckett wrote the play with him in mind), if without
Magee’s distinctive rasp. But even if you didn’t know this, his appearance is striking: stubbled on the face, pate shining from a circlet of white hair.
Accompanied by his diary and his Bible-sized dictionary, he recalls, but for the reel-to-reel tape machine in front of him, a Renaissance portrait of Jerome, patron saint of archivists. He is an embodiment of desuetude. The peeled bananas he eats hang, for a moment, in his mouth like flaccid penises. If you think this is unwarranted, consider that Beckett’s self-translated title for his French version of the play is La Dernière Bande, which means ‘the last erection’, as well as ‘the last tape’.
The second play is Beckett’s very free and contemporary translation of Robert Pinget’s La Manivelle ( The Crank), from 1960. It is, so to speak, Beckett humanised and naturalised. Again, the existential concerns are more alluded to than explicated. But, as with Krapp, the simplicity of the mise-en-scène is deceptive.
It looks and sounds like two old farts, Gorman and Cream, sitting on a bench, grumbling about the present and reminiscing about the past. They circle round, and don’t quite alight on, a matter of tragedy involving infant death. Beckett did more with this in his 1956 masterpiece All That Fall, which is, like The Old Tune, a radio play. It is one of his
slighter works; in a way, it is only barely one of his works at all, and he holds off putting his own stamp on it, except to change the original location from Paris to Somewhere in Ireland (presumably the Dublin suburbs). But Niall Buggy’s Gorman and David Threlfall’s Cream are impeccable. Gorman’s refrain, ‘When you think…’, is heartbreaking.
This production was originally a triple bill, with a version of Beckett’s TV play Eh Joe included. I particularly wanted to see this, as one of the cast (albeit offstage, recorded) is Lisa Dwan, who is incontestably the greatest interpreter of Beckett for the stage of our time. Well, you can’t have everything, I suppose.
nights when you could sit outside hearing birdsong, and the intoxicating effect of the greening of the world in spring. A cue to hear Hopkins’s ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring’. ‘The past became a country I dreamt about,’ said Padraig.
Anna had found, when clearing her parents’ house, old family audiotapes recorded at Hogmanays, weddings and funerals, where the Magnussons (Anna is the daughter of the late Magnus) sang songs of the past. We heard her and her sisters singing Dancing Cheek to Cheek, and the Katharine Tynan hymn All in the April Evening. Here the amateur rendition segued into the exquisite recording of the Glasgow Phoenix Choir.
Anna introduced a Bach organ sonata played by an Icelandic cellist, who said, ‘Bach’s always good to play. No matter what’s going on around us, sad or happy, he stabilises things.’ (Just what Mrs Miniver – ie Joyce Maxtone Graham – said after a wartime Myra Hess recital: ‘Bach is so very all-right-making, isn’t he.’) Such a well-constructed programme.
Still in the God slot – Thought for the Day – the honeyed voice of the Rev Marie-elsa Bragg caught my ear one fine morning. ‘In the last few months,’ she began, ‘six collared doves have nested under the roof of my closed local church.’ She had watched them feeding their young, white wings fluttering. But they had flown here over seas that contain thousands of tons of plastic garbage.
Could we please listen to Greta Thunberg’s warnings, and lead the way in rewilding and regenerative farming as Prince Charles urges, and remember Wordsworth’s words: ‘One impulse from a vernal wood /May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can.’ In that same poem, Tables Turned, ‘Let nature be your teacher,’ Wordsworth wrote.
There was a similar precept in Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights ( Book of the Week – and reviewed on page 53): her curiosity about everything in the natural world – from the ways of swifts to the impact of a total eclipse – made her another companionable essayist at times like this.
It makes me think that though there have been home-based periods when radio has been just as relied-on for information, it may now turn us into a generation of contemplatives, finding solace in words and music.
Along with the new Bob Dylan, I replay Julian Bream’s Dowland album, which I bought in 1968. Michael Berkeley’s Last Word reminiscences of the amiable Bream were spot-on: he was indeed ‘full of bonhomie’, always referring to his guitar as ‘the old box’, but he was ‘also a deadly serious musician’.
Among many welcome repeats, my greatest pleasure came from Ruth Rogers’s With Great Pleasure from 2018, which included the reading of a menu from her River Café. She fell in love with her architect husband Richard at 20, she said, ‘and I love him more and more and more’. Her account of their loss of son Beau at 28 touched the heart.
She invited her friend Ralph Fiennes to read – as he did perfectly – from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-up. Hours later, I was at the Bridge Theatre – first theatre visit for five months, face-masked and temperature-checked – watching Fiennes performing David Hare’s Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue. Hare’s graphic account of ‘a dirty bomb, thrown into the body to cause havoc’ started life as an item on Today, in April. Fiennes got a standing ovation.