Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett (1958)

It’s a simple but effective idea. For 40 minutes or so one old man is on stage sitting at a desk covered with folders and with one massive, old-fashioned tape recorder, as he rummages through old tapes and listens to what turn out to be old recordings of himself when young.

Beckett wrote it for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee after being impressed by hearing the actor reading extracts from Molloy and from An Abandoned Work on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957. It was originally titled ‘Magee monologue’.

The play premiered as a curtain raiser to Endgame (from 28 October 1958 to 29 November 1958) at the Royal Court Theatre, London, starring Magee and directed by Donald McWhinnie. It ran for 38 performances (Wikipedia). Here it is:

Sentimental

There’s a lot to say. I’ll limit myself to what seems to me by far the biggest single feature of the play which is that, in among all the stage business (the bananas and tape spools) the core of the text is the three-times repeated love scene of Krapp lying in the heather with a beautiful young woman

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her.

This is, well, almost sentimental. The only place in Beckett’s oeuvre where any character expresses straightforward, unironical, unsubverted, romantic ‘love’. Mind you the thrice repetition goes some way to sucking out the colour.

Mechanical

Obviously, the mechanical aspects of the scenario – the way the character plays certain sections of the tape and so hears his own voice repeating the same phrases – echo the obsessively mechanistic aspect of so much of Beckett’s fiction, which had reached an extraordinary peak of obsessively repeated and enumerated physical movements in the novel Watt. 

Solipsism

The situation of an old decrepit (‘Purple nose. Disordered grey hair. Unshaven.’) protagonist pondering his own thoughts, listening to his own words, reflecting on his own earlier self, safe in his ‘den’, comes from that pure stream of solipsistic narcissism which is so core to Beckett’s brand, the almost completely solitary narrators of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. In the real world, people take the mickey, pull your leg, bring you down a peg or two, force you to do the washing up and, of course, most of us have to go to work which involves meeting up with and engaging with ‘other people’.

Not in Beckett World. Here characters more often than not lie in bed (Malone Dies) or sit in wheelchairs (Endgame), are half buried in sand (Happy Days) or lie in a dreary bedsit (Eh Joe) talking at interminable length to themselves or about themselves.

With all this darkness around me I feel less alone.

Or, as here, where Beckett cleverly modernises the basic scenario with the inclusion of what, in 1958, was probably cutting edge technology, so that the solitary protagonist is doubled, we get double the amount of solipsism, solipsistic self-obsession².

Ritualised banality

It’s not really about what they say, most of it is almost unbearably trivial or trite. He gives a dog a rubber ball. He lies with his hand on a young woman’s breast. He remembers the lovely singing of a woman neighbour.

I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said.

Not earth-shattering, is it? Not really very interesting.

The value begins to derive from the repetition of some elements, giving them an incantatory value. The scenario of lying with the beautiful woman is drained of its initial ‘realistic’ sentimental force and changes into something else with the repetition. Repetition, classically, drains away meaning. Repeat a word long enough and it comes to seem absurd. Repeat the same action again and again and it becomes harder to go on. And the impossibility of going on but the unavoidable necessity of going on is more or less the central theme of Beckett’s entire oeuvre.

But on another level, it’s entirely about the language. It’s entirely about the language but it’s not really about what it says, its semantic content. It’s more like the sheer repetition of the words transforms them into a ritual or rite. Or at least Beckett’s texts behave as if they hope that will happen, and his fans treat them as if that does happen, the water of the mostly banal events described in mostly banal language being transformed into the wine of poetry, the magic of writing. I’m not so sure.

This is a production featuring noted playwright and actor Harold Pinter. In my opinion, although his voice is impressively deep and slow and portentous, it only emphasises how lame and poetry-less Beckett’s language is in this play. He tries to bring the character’s relishing of the repeated word ‘spool’ to life, imbuing it with some meaning or significance. Fails. For me, Beckett’s words fall stillborn from Pinter’s lips. Or tapes.

A world no longer empty

At the end he says:

Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

But it isn’t uninhabited, is it? The very reverse. The earth is overpopulated, crammed, jam-packed with the species which is destroying it. What’s really dated about this play is its assumption that solitariness can be attained. That you can sit in a house in the middle of the night and it be absolutely silent, with no planes or trains or automobiles roaring past. That the world has the space and time and patience for this kind of intense self-absorption.

When it was first produced maybe the play was a rather modish, forward-looking – what with the tape recorder and so on – examination of memory and loss. Now it seems nostalgically backward-looking, bespeaking a lost world of privacy and patience and limitless self-absorption.

Credit

Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett was first published in the summer of 1958, and first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 1958.

Related links

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

1 Comment
by Simon on November 27, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on November 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/krapps-last-tape-samuel-beckett/

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  1. Laughter and Annihilation: The Writing of Samuel Beckett – Mark Danner

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