KRAPP’S LAST TAPE by Samuel Beckett.
Directed by Vicky Featherstone. Performed by Stephen Rea. Landmark Productions. Dunstan Playhouse. Adelaide Festival Centre. Adelaide Festival 2025. February 27 – March 8 2025.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Stephen Rea is Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape. Photo: Pato Cassinoni | |
Darkness enfolds the space. Gradually a glimmer of light intrudes through the darkness. As it emerges, Krapp can be seen seated at a table, a solitary figure on the occasion of his 69th birthday. With the slow deliberate movement of an old man he removes a key from his pocket. He moves to the drawer of the table, pulls it out and reaching deep into the furtherest recess he removes a banana. He peels it slowly and deliberately and drops the skin to the floor. In just those few brief moments, actor Stephen Rea and director Vicky Featherstone faithfully create Beckett’s archetypal lone clown. Like the old silent movie stars that Beckett so admired, Rea personifies the hapless victim of his own circumstance, trapped in the private solitude of his mind, his memory and his past.
Director Featherstone and actor Rea in this Adelaide Festival exclusive of Krapp’s Last Tape have observed Beckett’s detailed stage directions, like the lazzi with the bananas and the sweeping of the tapes from the table or the drawn out utterance of the word ‘spool.’ Long pauses echo the silence of Krapp’s unspoken thought before he returns to continue playing the recording of his younger self at the age of 39. The tape is interrupted as he disappears to his den at the rear of the stage, presumably for a slug of whisky. He returns to resume remembrance of things past, such as his love affair with a girl upon a punt “where he laid his head upon her breast and his hand on her”
Rea is the consummate Beckett actor. His appearance in his confinement reflects neglect. Aspiration is disbanded by disappointment. In the relationship between the old man listening to himself on tape and the mechanical voice of a younger self there is a certain pathos that is the essence of the sad clown. The optimistic creation of an opus magnum thirty years earlier is pitifully contrasted by his admission that only 17 copies of his latest publication were distributed and eleven of those to trade buyers such as libraries. The sexual passion of a young man in lust is the antithesis of the time with Fanny, the bony old whore .
Crucial to the production is the actor’s relationship to the recorder. Rea makes it a second character in the drama. He bends over it, clicking it on and off at key moments to heighten the tension or to keep an audience in a state of anticipation before he returns from the den to the play button, relieving the tension or completing the anecdote. The recorder reveals his spool of memories, his judgement and the admonition of his younger self. The tape is a reminder of “his critical age and profound gloom and indigence”
And yet, Beckett allows no self pity. Loneliness is an accepted state of affairs for the aging writer. He is not attempting to recapture the past. There is still fire in him. He longs for the “burning to be gone” in the full knowledge of who he was and who he has become. Rea is totally credible. His Krapp is bitter, gloomy and lonely in the familiarity of his den while on tape we are reminded of a lyrical tenderness as a younger man infatuated with the girl on the punt. There is humour and pathos in Beckett’s lyricism and melancholy. Krapp is no Everyman but we identify with the loss of dreams and desire. This is the magnificence of Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett spans life’s trajectory and teaches us the lessons of experience. Rea embodies the straddled worlds of his character with pin sharp attention to detail.
Featherstone and Rea have created a Krapp who is true to Beckett’s vision. They have observed the details that Beckett has so meticulously and punctiliously described in his stage directions. The timing is perfect, the musicality of the text evocative and highly expressive and the interaction between actor, tape recorder and the recorded voice carefully interpreted and orchestrated.
Beckett’s characters, isolated from the external world and trapped within a world of their own imagining or recollection require an intimate relationship between performer and audience. I couldn’t help but feel that however true to Beckett’s vision performance and production were the impact of this acclaimed masterpiece was diminished to some extent by being performed in the Dunstan Playhouse of the Adelaide Festival Centre. It mitigated against the intimacy that Krapp’s Last Tape requires.
Nonetheless, the opportunity to see a brilliant exponent of the role of Krapp in a production that faithfully observes Beckett’s vision and motifs is an opportunity not to be missed.
Credits: Krapp Stephen Rea Director Vicky Featherstone Set Designer Jamie Vartan Costume Designer Katie Davenport Lighting Designer Paul Keogan Sound Designer Kevin Gleeson Audio Director Stephen Wright Production Manager Eamonn Fox Stage Manager Ciara Gallagher Assistant Stage Manager Ross Smith Costume Supervisor James Seaver McGlynn Associate Lighting Designer Eoin McNinch Sound Engineer | Original Tapes Bill Maul Set Construction TPS Photographer Patricio Cassinoni Videographer Aileen Power Graphic Design Gareth Jones FOR LANDMARK PRODUCTIONS Producer Anne Clarke Associate Producer Jack Farrell Marketing Manager Sinead McPhillips Marketing Assistant Hannah Morris Publicity Sinead O’Doherty | O’Doherty Communications
