Adelaide Festival. Landmark Productions. Presented by Arts Projects Australia and the Adelaide Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 28 Feb 2025
Good old Beckett. One had forgotten how driftingly absurd is his existential perspective.
Krapp is his shortest play. It is ridiculously brief. Some forty-five minutes. And yet, it is an epic lifetime.
One actor performs in the dark, at a table illumined by a one-bulb light. He’s the old man Krapp revisiting his younger years in a diary tape-recorded when he was thirty-nine. It is one recording from a lifetime of tapes, just one special spool.
“Spool” becomes a key word. Not only does the old man like the sound of it, it has its own meaning in the grand unravelling of memory. He unwinds the spool and feeds it into the old-school tape machine.
We’re of a generation now who would find this cumbersome technology incredible, and, indeed, the Playhouse’s sophisticated sound system and the practicalities of high class theatre do not permit the old tape to sound the way it probably would have. It comes over loud and clear as Krapp punches at the old spool tape recorder's buttons.
He stops it and starts it. Life comes in jumps. Eventually, he puts in a new tape and speaks for himself. The present-day Krapp is more seen than heard, albeit he shambles to and fro across the stage to retrieve this or that. His sourcing bananas from an idiosyncratic locked drawer, then peeling and eating same with a slightly clownish relationship to their skins is a highlight to an audience which seems eager to laugh. Well, isn’t every audience, come to think of it. Beckett has never been funny-bunny. His characters are adrift in the somewhere nowhere of life and time. Godot never comes. Krapp is a thwarted old man scouring his past. We see him in a predicament. We invade his privacy. We dip into the chance pile of his memories, of loves lost and youthful aspiration, the counting days of his mortality.
There is so little on that black stage so eerily lit by Paul Keogan, so little time expended and yet…
Krapp’s Last Tape was written for Patrick Magee, an Irish actor of excellence and, through its years has been performed by the best, Harold Pinter, Michael Gambon, and Brian Dennehy among them. Stephen Rea stands tall among them, an Irishman with a distinguished career, here directed by Vicky Featherstone. Quite right for an Adelaide Festival. He delivers Krapp with astute physicality, a rumpled elderly presence in body and soul. And, he leaves us properly haunted and pondering the mysteries of the human predicament, again, as well we should in an Adelaide Festival.
Applause. And the rest is silence.
Samela Harris
When: 28 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
