Festival review: Krapp’s Last Tape
In a meticulously staged production of a Samuel Beckett classic, Irish actor Stephen Rea gives a touchingly human account of a man in old age slowly revisiting and rewinding a life of disenchantment and missed opportunities.
“A country road. A tree. Evening.” In 1949, Samuel Beckett transformed the post-war theatre with a single play, Waiting for Godot. Clearing the decks of stage naturalism and psychologically detailed characters, he opted for theatrical minimalism. Less was never more than with Beckett. The busy-ness of the bourgeois stage — all that talking and moving about — was replaced with monosyllables and stillness. Instead of glib answers there were only questions. Will we ever know enough to complete the picture? Will Mr Godot come tomorrow?
Beckett’s third play, written in 1958, is differently stark. “A late evening in the future. Krapp’s den” — What new Hell is this going to be ? Krapp’s Last Tape uses an ingenious, but completely plausible, device to examine the idea of memory as being both truthful and deceptive.
For 55 minutes, a 69-year-old man listens to a series of tape recordings he has made of his thoughts and feelings when he was 39. And that 39-year-old also ponders the life of his younger self again, back even to glimpses and fragments of childhood.
For the old man these are not recollections in tranquility. Instead they are rebukes and painful reminders of lost opportunities, false hope, and fading, irretrievable time.
In this Landmark Productions staging, just opened in the Dunstan Playhouse as part of the Adelaide Festival, prominent UK director Vicky Featherstone has opted for an interesting and unexpected restraint in her approach.
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Beckett’s stage instructions are minimal, but they have, over time, led to conventions such as surrounding Krapp with, well… crap. Settings looking like a hoarder’s paradise. The rag and bone shop of the heart. A ruined man in his ruined den.
Instead, set designer Jamie Vartan has located Krapp in sparse surroundings. A simple bare table, with an interminably long drawer to prolong the banana gags, located on a raised platform, a single lamp suspended above, and a ramp leading to an unseen room behind. It is from there that Krapp industriously fetches piles of tape boxes and sneaks a slurp from the noisily uncorked bottle he has stashed away.
Paul Keogan’s lighting vividly etches the central action, gently mocking perhaps, the false protestations of illumination from Krapp version 2.0 . Costume designer, Katie Davenport keeps faithful to Beckett’s prescription — the black narrow trousers, crumpled white shirt, capacious sleeveless waistcoat, and bodgie white boots that thud across the stage when he exits.
These details remind us of favourite inspirations for Beckett — the silent comedy of Buster Keaton and, in the case of Godot, the hat-swapping routines taken straight from Laurel and Hardy. We can see the playwright’s delight in the long, silent opening sequence when Krapp, in mesmerising slow motion, peels and eats one banana and then, after almost slipping on the peel, even more slowly eats another. It deliberately re-defines excruciation.
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Many great actors have played the role of Krapp — Beckett deliberately exploits the dull thud in his name, by the way, as we also hear in the recurrent reports of our anti-hero’s bowel movements .
Beckett wrote the play with Irish actor Patrick Magee in mind, and he was imposing and irascible. Hume Cronyn was cranky, John Hurt distraught and crestfallen, and Max Wall, the music hall comic, capered with the word ‘spool’ with particular delectation.
Irish actor Stephen Rea, guided by Vicky Featherstone, is a more contemplative character. The fulminations and table thumping are more muted — even when he sends a stack of tapes flying. He is not dishevelled, grimy and unshaven, his thick dark, curly hair is not standing out in anguished spikes. Even his faculties are more intact. He is mildly deaf, but doesn’t shout, he can’t see, but doesn’t peer extravagantly, he doesn’t walk with a geriatric stoop. This Krapp is in surprisingly good nick.
It means the play has less angry angst and more mordant musing. Rea is still haunted by past failures and missed chances, especially in love. Hunched over his Grundig, he repeatedly pores over that section in Box 3, Spool 5, where his girlfriend dismisses their relationship without even opening her eyes. But his response is not demented, or laced with misogyny. It is rueful and profoundly sad.
There are great pleasures in Stephen Rea’s measured delivery, and the fact (on the off-chance that he might sometime get to play the role) he had actually recorded the taped sections of the play some twelve years before this performance, is a terrific bonus.
But this production steps short of countenancing the “sour cud and the iron stool.” Maybe 69 is the new 47. Perhaps the terrors of aging, decrepitude, amnesia, and impotent rage can be postponed for a while. But maybe it is also still a legitimate crisis to be very disappointed and glum.
Krapp’s Last Tape is playing and unspooling at the Dunstan Playhouse until March 8
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