JIM KEAVENEY examines the enduring appeal of Krapp's Last Tape as two major productions take place in England starring Gary Oldman and Stephen Rea
KRAPP'S LAST TAPE continues to draw audiences and actors almost 70 years after Samuel Beckett wrote the play in a single three-week burst of inspiration, having heard the actor Patrick Magee reading extracts from his prose on the radio.
Magee played Krapp at the play's premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1958 - the first in a long line of Irish actors to play the role with Cyril Cusack, David Kelly, Jack MacGowran, Michael Gambon and Barry McGovern all following him. The mini-masterpiece (it can clock in as short as 30 minutes or as long as an hour) has attracted international talent too: at different moments on either side of the Atlantic you could see Albert Finney, Harold Pinter, John Hurt, Brian Dennehy or Max Wall in the role.
It's no surprise that actors are taken by the play: it demands a virtuosic one-man performance with an actor essentially starring alongside versions of themselves as the titular Krapp spending the performance listening to old recordings of himself as he prepares to make his annual diary-style tape on his 69th birthday.
It may be why Krapp is presented in triplicate this year: in New York, where F. Murray Abraham performed at the Irish Repertory Theatre; in London at the Barbican with Stephen Rea reprising his performance from Dublin last year; and in York from April as Gary Oldman returns to the stage for the first time since the late 1980s.
Oldman apparently “face the hopes of his past self” in the York production. Could it then offer the sentimentality seen in Hurt's performances as he cradles the tape recorder, pining for his old life? Hurt said that "everybody who plays [Krapp] has to find a specific reason for its existence" - for him, he viewed Beckett's play as autobiographical and, ultimately, "a kind of essay in aloneness."
I was lucky enough to see his 2013 run at Dublin's Gate Theatre and the play's final moments were devastating. "Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back," the younger version of Krapp asserted strongly as the older Krapp finds himself lost in their memories, Hurt staring off into the distance as his younger self spoke, finally, of "the fire in me now" and we watched a man, whose fire had long extinguished, shrink in front of us.
Hurt utilised recordings of himself from 1999 in that production. Rea uses a similar trick for his performances at the same theatre, having recorded the younger parts over a decade ago in anticipation of eventually playing Krapp. In Dublin, he stripped away the sentimentality displayed by Hurt. The Guardian described how Rea brought "a harsh, almost sarcastic tone to his self-criticism, deepening its pathos. Whatever hint of sentimentality there might have been is dispelled here." Sentimentality or not, we pity Krapp.
And we pity him in Abraham's hands as he locates the play's "interstices", according to the New York Times, "[cradling] that old reel-to-reel tape player as he once cradled a woman’s torso" - as Hurt did too. The Wall Street Journal marked Abraham's performance as one of "compelling mordancy as Krapp listens, largely with visible self-contempt but occasionally wistful wonder." Its critic, Charles Isherwood, writes: "I will not soon forget the look of stunned, stony despair on Mr. Abraham’s craggy face, etched with deep grooves, as Krapp listens to his own damning words." The same experience I had of Hurt, and has stayed with me until today.
That is what draws actors to Beckett and to Krapp's Last Tape - the opportunity to take this role with all of its potential, even within Beckett's notorious (and compulsory) directorial staging notes, and to put your own unique mark on the character while leaving a lasting mark on audiences night after night. That's what draws us back as audiences too; the impact Beckett has in such a short space of time. In what new ways can Oldman and Rea move me? I can't wait to find out.
Krapp's Last Tape
Theatre Royal York from 14 April to 17 May,
Barbican, London from 30 April to 3 May
See More: Barbican, Beckett, Drama, Theatre Royal York
