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Krapp’s Last Tape

Published Wednesday 18 October 2006 at 17:05 by Gerald Berkowitz

Offering two Nobel Laureates for the price of one, it is appropriate that a production of Samuel Beckett’s one-character play performed by Harold Pinter should be particularly minimalist in both text and performance. Utilising a cut-down text of the already short play, presumably one of those edited by Beckett himself when he directed various productions, Pinter and director Ian Rickman keep the focus entirely on the core experience of the elder Krapp reacting to the sound of his younger voice on tape.

Cut are the bananas and most other physical comedy, meaning that Pinter can raise laughs with the slightest of comic touches, such as disappearing offstage for a drink before he’s spoken a word, and one of the listened-to tapes. This leaves Krapp’s contempt and impatience with his younger self’s philosophising, his grudgingly becoming absorbed in the account of a romantic interlude and his anger at himself for allowing himself to feel.

Lit to accent his gauntness and utilising a mechanised wheelchair, Pinter embodies the play’s paradox of a still vital man trying to will himself into a kind of death-in-life. If there have been warmer or more comic Krapps in recent years, there can scarcely be any that so captured the cold objectivity of Beckett’s vision.

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