“Authentically Beckettian”
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Landmark’s Krapp’s Last Tape feels like an act of time travel. Featuring Stephen Rea as Krapp under the direction of Vicky Featherstone, former artistic director of the Court, their reunion is authentically Beckettian in every sense. It is imbued with endurance, pain, fear, and ruthless self-criticism while never losing Beckett’s signature dark humour through his mastery of language. Notably, Krapp’s Last Tape is one of the few plays Beckett conceived and wrote directly in English after the war, carrying the play’s crisp, ironic tension throughout.
The Barbican stage might seem almost too vast for this production with the expanse of empty space threatening the play’s immensity. However, once Rea steps onto the stage, carrying his boxes of tapes and the reel-to-reel recorder, such very vastness all of a sudden makes great sense. Unlit and uninhabited, this forgotten, discarded void even devours the banana peel into endless blackness, let alone Krapp’s age, time, memory, and feelings.
It is remarkable that Rea recorded these earlier tapes twelve years ago without any certainty of playing Krapp in the future. What it matters, Rea said, is to mark the distinctive differences between the vocal qualities and textures, marking the passing of time and making Krapp all the more tangible. While realism is seldom the word used to describe Beckett’s work, in this production, absurdity and realism uncannily merge together. While the ridiculously overlong drawer certainly conveys its absurd nature, Krapp’s banana-eating, though originally a tribute to slapstick comedy, feels strangely sentimental and real through Rea’s struggling, weary physicality – Krapp’s getting old.
Paul Keogan’s lighting captures and enhances such old man’s existential crisis together with Jamie Vartan’s minimalist design. While the grand barbican theatre is shrouded in darkness (except for the bit distracting, but definitely necessary fire exit sign), the sheer light in this space we have is the spotlight illuminating Rea to the desk, as if caught in a void of his own mind, and a faint backlighting through the doorway.
Sometimes, the stage is empty, with Krapp offstage making bizarrely loud noises (sound designed by Kevin Gleeson) behind that doorway. Other times, the stage feels even much emptier with Krapp onstage, sitting at the table and busy listening his birthday tapes, including the most famous “Farewell to love” tape – a too weighty love memory for the current Krapp to carry. According to director Featherstone, it is extremely romantic, while Rea’s rendition also adds a layer of fatigued, weary relief. Krapp also records a new one, which might be the funniest moment in the play. But the devouring emptiness is always there, lingering and hanging.
Minimal. Silent. Absolute darkness, with just the faintest illusion of existential liveliness. This Landmark’s production renders Beckett’s theatrical asceticism to its fullest through expanded silence and an unyieldingly emptied space, where Krapp’s mutterings and sluggish gestures appear almost like vignettes from a dream, dissolving into the bustling Barbican crowds after the curtain calls.