SAMUEL Beckett’s solo play Krapp’s Last Tape is one of the great tragicomedies about the preposterousness of the human condition. Its setting – an old man, Krapp, alone in an austere room, sitting at a table upon which is placed an old reel-to-reel tape recorder – is decidedly modest. However, its reflections on such themes as time and regret are expansive.
It’s a play that Dominic Hill, artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre Company, knows well. In 2012 he directed the superb actor Gerard Murphy as Krapp in what, sadly, turned out to be the Irishman’s final production.
Now, with the Citizens Theatre closed for major redevelopment, Hill comes to the Tron with this revival of his 2020 staging of the play for Leeds Playhouse. Starring another fine Irish actor, Niall Buggy, it reminds us of the immense flexibility and fruitfulness of this extraordinary play.
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Many tremendous actors – including Patrick Magee, John Hurt, Harold Pinter, Michael Gambon and the great theatre-in-prisons pioneer Rick Cluchey – have tackled the role of Beckett’s witty and irascible old man who, on each birthday, records a spoken commentary on his life, after listening to a tape from the past. Like theirs, Buggy’s Krapp is subtly distinctive and powerfully expressive of the great depth and humanity of Beckett’s writing.
This Krapp seems, at the outset, to be even more forlorn than we might expect. All the better for him to take spiritually uplifting pleasure in elongating the vowels in the word “spool”. His initial, lethargically subdued condition enables enlivening moments of contrast. Buggy’s Krapp is given to sudden, surprising outbursts of energetic exasperation and delightful amusement.
He begins the recording of what will be – unbeknownst to him, one suspects – his final tape with the legendary line: “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for 30 years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that.” As he does so, he gives voice and body to the terrific amalgam of pathos, humour, self-loathing, remorse and dignity that is contained within his character.
It says something about the never-ending fecundity of this play that an outstanding director such as Hill should have returned to it anew after just eight years. Glasgow audiences are blessed that he has done so.
They are fortunate, too, that the director has partnered the piece with a newly commissioned drama, a response to Krapp’s Last Tape, by one of Scotland’s finest playwrights Linda McLean. Opening the evening, Go On casts the great Scottish actor Maureen Beattie as both Jane (a woman preparing to take her indefinite leave) and Jayne (her droid alter-ego).
Maureen Beattie as Jane in Go On. Photograph: Mihaela Bodlovic
Like Krapp, it is a play that contemplates memory and the ways in which we seek to retain it. Krapp’s method is, necessarily for a play that was written in 1958, analogue. Jane’s is, only slightly futuristically, digital.
We in 2021 tend to record our memories on social media platforms or in files on computer hard drives. Jane, by contrast, is trying to teach her AI doppelganger not only to remember like her, but also to give the impression that she feels like her.
From insisting upon the medical ethics of her son, who is a doctor, to singing the kookaburra song, learned in her childhood, Jane’s training of Jayne (by way of projected video) is as beautifully performed as it is intriguing. Like a Beckett play first encountered, I suspect it will reward a second viewing.
The production of this double bill has ended its short run. However, as the title of McLean’s play suggests, it deserves to go on.
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