Fine performance of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape

Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett
Mirror Theatre Productions
A Theatre Corporate Revival Production
Directed by Paul Gittins
Basement Theatre, Auckland
Until October 10

The action of Krapp’s Last Tape takes place in Krapp’s office or studio. It is his 69th birthday and he is about to record his annual tape recording of reflections on the past year of his life.

Before doing this he listens to a tape recoding he made 30 years before in which he reflects on his even earlier life.

That this is his last tape brings with it some intimations of mortality as well as evidence of a life not fully lived.

Krapp is something of a washed up artist, a writer, possibly a dramatist. He acknowledges that he has sold only a few copies of his latest, possibly only, book and that he has never realised his full potential.

As with many of Beckett’s other works, the play explores the way in which we, or at least the artist or actors on stage try to make sense of the world – through language, analysis and contemplation.

But it is always an impossible task and, as with Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, there is no resolution, answer or understanding. It is the plight of modern man to fail in trying to understand their predicament.

Added to this is what seems to be Beckett's fascination or anxiety about the passage of time and the process of ageing

This is all bound up in the role of Krapp who is a strange mixture of clown, stand up comedian, philosopher and artist.

He is surrounded by his past in the form of boxes of tapes, a few written records and reference books. This is his past which anchors him, providing him with his life but it also restrains and inhibits him

As Krapp the older listens to his younger self he laughs at his jokes, sympathises with his observations and is drawn into the emotional life of his former self. Ultimately he rejects his earlier self as just a “stupid bastard."

Edward Newborn does a fantastic job in creating the charcater of Krapp, or rather the two Krapps – the one on stage and the one of 30 years before on tape.

His Krapp has intense realism as well as being a metaphorical, almost abstract creation. He is obviously a younger man playing an older one, employing the techniques of the actor.

His performance is about the deception and the truth inherent in theatre.

Newborn is particularly fine in his Proustian-like descriptions of his romantic encounter with a young woman in a boat. He keeps replaying the section where he speaks about lying “down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her.”

It is as though he is recreating in his mind the sensations of heat, youth and sensuality. For the audience it provides a fleeting insight into the despair, speculation and the pleasure of revisiting the past without bothering about the future.

That the play has been staged is part of what must be a revival of interest in Beckett with Silo Theatre just having finished its season of Happy Days and last month there was Waiting for Godot with Sir Ian McKellen in Christchurch and Wellington.

Next month at the Melbourne Arts Festival you can pick up Beckett’s trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.